Charlie Le Mindu: Beyond the fringe

A hair salon for OAPs in deepest rural France may not seem the most likely cradle of avant-garde styling talent, but according to Charlie Le Mindu, it was the perfect apprenticeship for his present role as east London's resident coiffeur and wig-maker extraordinaire.

"It was the first place I worked and it was my favourite," confesses Le Mindu, whose CV also includes stints at Vidal Sassoon and Toni & Guy. "Only grandmothers went there, so I learnt all the classic techniques. Once you've mastered those, you can do anything."

Sitting in Le Mindu's Shoreditch studio, surrounded by his 14-piece debut collection, it's hard not to wonder what the ladies who had their locks permed and set by the teenage Le Mindu might make of his current oeuvre.

From six-inch-high, Madame de Pompadour meets the Jetsons confections of back-combing, to a three-foot-wide curtain of tumbling crimson hair that seems to float above the head, and a glossy black number that incorporates a model of a grinning human skull, these are the kind of wigs that even Cher (the ultimate wig-wearer, according to Le Mindu) might consider over the top.

"I didn't approach the collection with a big theme," says Le Mindu, whose delightfully Zoolander-esque name really is the one given to him by his parents. "But it all turned out very dark – a bit Baroque, a bit Gothic. I didn't have any one inspiration but I like designers such as Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier – theatrical and dramatic."

Le Mindu, now just 22, has already packed a lot in to his short fashion career. At 16, he moved from his native Médoc in the south-west of France to Bordeaux to work in a punk hairdressers "where everyone was smoking pot and shaving their dogs' hair into weird styles". By 18, he was working his magic on the tresses of party-goers in Berlin's nightclubs (he found nobody got anything much done in the daytime in the German capital).

Since moving to London a little over a year ago, Le Mindu has become the hairdresser of choice for the capital's coolest denizens, setting up pop-up salons in trendy spots around the city and tending to the bowls and bobs of east London scenesters such as Carri Mundane, the designer behind the Cassette Playa clothing label. It wasn't until his fashion- stylist boyfriend asked him to make a wig for a catwalk show that he realised he could create much wilder styles working with hair that did not come attached to a person.

Six months of painstaking work and £6,000 worth of human hair (he thinks it's probably Russian) later, Le Mindu found himself with a collection of pieces so certain to upstage any outfits they might accompany that he decided to stage the first fashion show dedicated to wigs at the most recent London Fashion Week.

Le Mindu's timing couldn't be better, as fake hair of all forms is currently enjoying a comeback. The wig concession in Topshop's flagship Oxford Circus store in London is doing a roaring trade and, around the country, department stores have seen a dramatic rise in sales as more women emulate celebrities' penchant for extensions, hair pieces and full wigs.

While Le Mindu's couture styles are unlikely to be spotted on a head near you any time soon, he, too, has noticed that wigs are enjoying a popularity among younger women that has not been seen since the 1960s, although he has strict ideas about how they should be worn in the real world: "I see a lot of young people wearing quite natural-looking wigs very beautifully, but I hate it when boring bankers wear comedy styles on a night out!"

Those bold enough to try Le Mindu's wigs beyond the catwalk include London drag queen du jour Jodie Harsh and cult electronica singer Peaches. Le Mindu's most famous client, however, is a little more conservative, despite being known the world over for her synthetic blonde barnet: he had the rather fiddly task of styling 150 Barbie dolls for her 50th birthday celebrations earlier this year.

Le Mindu reckons the flipside of the vogue for artificial hair might be a simultaneous return to more natural-looking locks, but he promises there will be no watering down of his next collection: "It's going to be even weirder," he confides with a fiendish grin.

www.charlielemindu.com