Chelsey Pickthorn and Jocelyn Simone of Bushwick’s premier hair coloring salon, Pickthorn, are taking their A game on the road.
Starting March 31, hair colorist Chelsey Pickthorn and the programming director Jocelyn Simone will be touring eight American cities, not unlike a rock band. Within five weeks, they will visit Austin, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Denver, and in each city, they’ll teach a hair coloring class, do make-overs on local bands, and film live music sessions.
Pickthorn, located on 61 Wyckoff Ave., has been coloring the hair of top models and actors as well as interested locals since 2012. The salon is known for its love of music, and for three years, it has held a music and hair festival called Color Me Bushwick during the first weekend in June. In conjunction with the performance schedule, Chelsey transforms the looks of the performing bands.
“I give them new haircut, new color, new sense of confidence on the stage, […] inspired by their stage presence, by their music, by the way they move,” Chelsey Pickthorn tells Bushwick Daily.
“A lot of the times, the musicians are spending so much money on practice spaces, equipment, and vans … so this is something we can offer them back,” adds Jocelyn Simone.”Music and hair have always gone together, it’s an integral part of genre and style.”
The women recall the local rock’n’roll darlings, Sunflower Bean, whom they met in 2014. “Chelsey was like, ‘Oh my God, I’d love to work with them’,” explains Jocelyn. The band’s frontwoman Julia Cummings, who also models for Yves Saint Laurent, received a beautiful blond hair color at Pickthorn that is said to have changed the course of her career.
For their upcoming tour, the women will be stopping at different hair salons and academies in the eight cities. There, they will host a two-day class taught by Chelsey. In each city, they will pick several musicians who will be their models at these classes. They have a wish list of musicians they hope to work with that spans a wide spectrum of musical genres, and they plan to work with some 80 musicians and 160 students.
For each class, Chelsey will prepare a vision board inspired by the musicians. Chelsey will show them how she does her famous hair-painting technique. “I do hair so differently that they’ll get a taste of something they don’t do in a hair salon,” she says. On day two, the students will be styling the bands.
For this tour, Pickthorn has obtained a serious tour bus and they are bringing a media team consisting of photographers, videographers and sound engineers, most of whom are their long-term collaborators and fellow women.
With each of the bands they style, they will film a live music video and do a photoshoot, so bands as well as stylists will have a new promotional video and photography materials. “Everybody’s winning,” Chelsey says.
The locations for the shoots are also in works. “Right now, we have a really amazing inspiration board going on with our team of places where we want to shoot,” says Jocelyn. “We’re looking for the most colorful and interesting places we can find. Some venues, historical parks, maybe a little graffiti, a little grunge.”
If everything goes according to plan, Pickthorn also hopes to put out a live compilation record of all the artists in different cities.
This entire project is possible thanks to Pickthorn’s sponsor, Davines, who asked Pickthorn to organize an educational program. Pickthorn doesn’t fit into a traditional sponsorship mold: to make the collaboration work, the women came up with the tour and the makeovers for musicians they love.
“We really wanted to cultivate and inspire change in the industry,” Chelsey says. “There is a certain box in hair-dressing, and we wanted to break out.”
Watch the makeovers of Sunflower Bean and Honduras.
Follow @WECOLORLIVE throughout the tour. We Color Live East Coast leg will be coming in Fall 2017.
Pickthorn salon will be closed in the month of April, so if you want to get your lilac hair on a la Julia Cummings, book it ASAP.
Cover photo: Kava Gorna courtesy of Pickthorn