The world’s most famous hair right now is not in a museum, or styling academy, or even on someone’s head. It’s in Charlie Le Mindu’s personal archive in Brooklyn.
The French fashion designer is the creator of Chappell Roan’s “hair costume” and hair set design for The Subway music video, which was formally released last week after a year of live-exclusive performances. The video sees a forlorn and heartbroken Chappell roam through New York, her iconic red curls exaggeratedly long and piling up on the floor around her. The hair gets stuck in taxi doors and filled with trash, and provides a welcome nest for rats. By turns, Chappell’s hair invokes Botticelli’s Venus, Rosetti’s Lady Lillith, Millai’s Ophelia, and Cousin Itt from The Addams Family.
Charlie was approached by Chappell, her creative team, and the music video director Amber Grace Johnson around five months ago, initially with a different concept, “but still all about wigs and hair, hair monsters and stuff.” I’m speaking to Charlie over webcam from his home in Brooklyn, where he beams through the camera, piercings dripping from his earlobes.
“I think they came to me because I’m so used to working with costume and hair design, and giant hair sculptures,” he says.
But the design had to be unique. “They wanted something different to what I did for Doja,” laughs Charlie, who also made Doja Cat’s incredible Coachella hairsuits in 2024.
“There were so many drawings back and forth. I’m pretty sure we sent about 50 drawings before arriving to this,” he says. “Hair is such a specific material to be working with, but I’ve been doing hair costume for 25 years now and I know what aspect I’m going to do. Actually, the first drawing my team did, and the last drawing we did, were exactly the same costume. I knew it was the best proposition, so we came back to it.”
Charlie’s team created three different “hair costumes” for the video, collaborating with stylists and wig designers Lacy Redway and John Novotny, and Chappell’s go-to stylist Dom Forletta in the promotional photography. “That long wig and all the ones in the subway or in the fountain and stuff is basically exactly the same costume, we just curled it a bit more, or on the bike there was a train where we attached longer pieces of wigs with snaps and mixed trash in it. It’s a mixture of costume design and set design.”
But the technical aspect of the video was the most challenging. “The biggest part was really about the installations, or making stuff like the train that drags her along behind the taxi. The rat’s nest is my favourite part of the video, and it was a lot of work because we made these four giant 3x2m panels of hair.”
“There’s no CGI in the video, except for the green hair she climbs on in the end, but even then, we created a giant ladder of green hair for that. The rest were all physical props.”
Charlie also insists on only working with real human hair for his fantastical designs. “The great thing about human hair is that you can use real products that make it look fuller and thicker. You can really change the shape of a costume and really have a completely different piece of clothing by giving it movement, or different products. And it just looked like really thick hair. But there were a lot of hair extensions, and the ones we were using were about 45 inches (114cm).”
In the video, Chappell seems wretchedly weighed down by her Rapunzel hair, which holds the memory of her former relationship. She even swaps out for a bob designed by Lacy Redway at the song’s climax. But Charlie insists that physical comfort is his first priority when creating a new costume, and that the biggest wigs and hair pieces only weighed around six kilos.
“It’s really more like costume designer kind of work, which I’ve learned from working in theatres and doing operas and stuff. It’s about comfort. I need to know the movement they want to achieve, that’s where the design starts. I call it a crash test. Everything needs to be possible to do. So if she needs to be jumping, we’re gonna have to reform and redo the air, recurl and wash it and stuff. Especially when a performer is so big and famous, they want to feel light, and they don’t want anything to be annoying to them. We have to think about the easiest way for them to perform, and also how to take it off so the body can breathe.”
The campiness and humour of Charlie’s hair design provides the perfect balance to Chappell’s devastating sapphic heartbreak ballad. She is a drag queen, after all.
“I’ve always been inspired by drag,” says Charlie. “My mum was a drag king and a stripper, and I was watching John Waters and all those super Queer movies when I was a kid. But also I feel like the way drag artists make their costumes is very valuable. You learn a lot from it, both in terms of the technical aspect, but also how someone can make something with nothing. It’s the same with Cosplay. It’s so inspiring, the techniques that you can find. That really had a lot of input in my work, in terms of making wigs and volume, and knowing what kinds of materials I can be using.”
From now on, the New York subway will be associated with three things: rats, rubbish, and metres of curly red hair.
