Fashion’s long-standing love of pink hair

Jonathan Anderson’s first couture show for Dior, presented in Paris this January, was a reminder that great design often starts with a simple idea. This creativity touched everything from the silhouettes to the beauty looks, including the remarkable hairstyles, masterminded by revered hairstylist Guido Palau.

Mirroring Anderson's own directive for the collection, Palau translated a personal exchange between the Irish designer and former Dior creative director John Galliano into a romantic vision: a series of blush-pink wigs and pom-pom florals. The inspiration came from a bouquet of cyclamen – soft lilac and powder-pink blooms tied with a black silk ribbon – that Galliano gifted Anderson during a visit to his atelier last year. Anderson later described the gesture as “perfect,” and it ultimately became a defining motif of the collection, subtly referencing Christian Dior’s enduring love of flowers and horticulture.

The wigs were cut into ultra-short bobs with veil-like fringes obscuring the models’ faces, evoking mystery and purity. Their unexpected faded-pink hue added an avant-garde edge, encapsulating a fashion house that has balanced elegance and innovation since its founding in 1946.

Pink hair has an uncanny ability to etch itself in the collective imagination, repeatedly emerging as a symbol of joy, rebellion, and romance. Among its most iconic moments is Kate Moss’s Spring 1999 Versace runway appearance with bright pink hair, a seminal example of unconventional beauty styling. This same year, she posed for Juergen Teller’s famous 1998 photograph 'Young Pink Kate', in which she is seen tucked up in billowy white linens, her head surrounded by sprawl of pink locks, capturing the nonchalant, kittenish charm that defined her public persona.

Pastel-tinted hair, however, is far from a modern invention. In the late 17th century, women of the French royal court dusted their wigs with soft pink, lavender, and baby-blue pigments, an aesthetic echoed in Kirsten Dunst’s cotton-candy coiffure in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 iconic movie, Marie Antoinette. In Britain, this rococo hairstyle trend was more subdued, embraced by flamboyant dressers and rendered with particular sensitivity by miniature portraitist John Smart who excelled at capturing its rosy tones.

The appeal of pink hair arguably reached a pinnacle of popularity in the bold, defiant aesthetics of the 1980s, swiftly embraced by music icons such as Cyndi Lauper and Madonna. In more recent decades, the shade has been revisited by a wide range of celebrities, from Lady Gaga and Lily Allen to Nicki Minaj and Bella Hadid. Guido Palau famously coloured model Kaia Gerber's hair pink in 2020, a colour he later described as " a little soft and a little antique," a description that seems fitting of his latest wigs for Dior too.

On the runway, Jean Paul Gaultier was an early pioneer. His Fall 1992 show at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium, staged as a fundraiser for amfAR, featured male models with choppy, bubble-gum-pink crop cuts, setting the tone for an evening of irreverence and expressive freedom. Madonna, bleach-blonde on this occasion, famously walked the runway in a black maxi dress with cut-out breasts.

For Spring/Summer 2003, Gaultier adopted a more sculptural approach inspired by the mobiles of Alexander Calder. Natalia Vodianova appeared in two memorable pink constructions: an exaggerated nest-like topknot, followed by a swirl of candyfloss shaped like a giant sunhat, both styles finessed with long, cascading strands. For his Spring-Summer 2003 Haute Couture collection, some models' hair was braided with pink buttons.

Pink hair also recurred throughout Galliano’s work, both at his own label and during his tenure at Dior. In his Belle Époque–inspired Spring/Summer 1998 collection, Shalom Harlow appeared in a rose-embroidered pink organza gown, complete with a cherry-hued flapper wig. Galliano’s long-time collaborator Julien d’Ys later created the now-iconic carnivalesque wigs for his Fall 2009 catwalk, including a vivid candy-pink version that remains widely circulated on social media today.

Beyond Galliano, d’Ys’s decades-long collaboration with Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons has yielded countless sculptural hair designs, with bright pink a recurring favourite. For the Fall/Winter 2009 'Wonderland' collection, exaggerated fuchsia chignons crowned the head like balls of wool, transforming softness into something strange and otherworldly.

A new generation of models has continued to redefine pink hair as a statement of self-defined beauty. Charlotte Free sparked a global craze in the early 2010s with her trademark pink locks, walking runways and fronting campaigns for the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Jeremy Scott, and Chanel.

More recently, Chinese-Australian model Fernanda Ly has brought a sleek, retro-goth sensibility to pastel pink hair, photographed by Juergen Teller for Louis Vuitton’s Fall/Winter 2015 and Spring/Summer 2016 campaigns. Kate Moss reprised her electric pink 90s look for Marc Jacobs' resort 2022 campaign, while Aeri Uchinaga (AKA Japanese-South Korean rapper and singer Giselle) who recently embraced what fans are calling her 'pink-haired era', was the star of LOEWE Paula's Ibiza 2025 campaign. Proof that pink hair remains a potent and exciting force in fashion imagery.