Session stylist Rudi Lewis developed a series of head-turningly bright headpieces for Acne Studios’ flagship store. The label’s last winter collection Acne Studios F/W20 saw a focus on juxtaposing quintessence with a hint of deliberate chaos, as seen in traditionally opulent fabrics like brocades ending in trendily distressed and frayed hemlines, and earthy tones being paired with sporadic splashes of electric blues and fiery orange-reds. To compliment this collection of “functional archetypes with injections of creativity” as Acne describes it, Lewis and his team went to work experimenting with hair and plastic to explore colour, texture and shapes.

What is the Art Raving project? Art Raving was a collaboration with Acne Studios for their A/W 2020 collection.

What kind of brief were you given? When they approached me originally, it was to come up with some kind of series of headpieces, which would be on mannequins in their flagship store in Stockholm, which has just been redesigned. But then it evolved into a whole photo shoot. They gave me samples of some of the colours in the collection and we talked about tapping into rave, but in a very abstract way. It needed to feel like something very curated and considered, but which had sort of exploded.

What did your creative process entail for developing this concept? I had been looking a lot at Murano glass vases and I wanted to replicate the idea of paint or colour trapped inside. I needed a substance which was malleable and didn’t weigh a tonne, so I started looking at plastic and I sent Acne a few samples of what such a material would look like, and it really just expanded from there.

Like everyone else on the planet, I had quite a lot of spare time on my hand due to the pandemic, so I spent a few weeks experimenting with different materials to find the right way to trap hair in plastic, and to figure out the right weight, density and properties I needed to make it behave how I wanted. Meanwhile, my assistants were colouring masses of hair in these rave/acid colours, and testing what that looked like frozen in motion. Eventually I got what I was looking for and made lots of different prototypes which I sent to the creative director and from there we continued developing them. On the day of the shoot we began by shooting the pieces as they were and then slowly I began to cut away segments of the plastic so that the hair began to ‘explode’ out of confinement… and that is how we ended up with the Art Raving images.