What if the very thing we’re taught to tame are the things that make us special? This question has been swirling around in hair artist Kayra Theodore’s head since childhood. It’s also the message behind her first-ever hair show, Untied. “It was important for me to make sure my first collection started from the beginning,” she tells ESSENCE exclusively.

Walking into the back courtyard at 99 Scott, a coveted location for fashion shows, I take a left into an industrial warehouse. Two rows of black chairs line both sides of the space with a card on every seat. On the front of the show note, there’s a school girl in a uniform with braided bows pinned up her white socks. She’s holding a red book with the name of the show “Untied” scribbled on. 

A wooden school desk and chair sat in the middle of the floor. Then, an administrative announcement came over the loud speaker as if we were all back in school again. A woman guided the hand of a little uniformed girl—with braids, barrettes, and white bows in her hair—to her desk. 

“Makeup, jewelry, and hairstyles can be distracting to others and detrimental to the school climate,” the announcement asserted as the child sat and listened. “All forms of expression is to remain conservative.” The little girl who grew up internalizing these rules was Theodore. And, the girl in the chair was a memory of herself. 

Growing up with Haitian parents, “they would put bows in my hair before I go to school,” she says. But, on the first day of sixth grade, she walked in and realized she was the only Black girl in her class. “All of the students would make fun of my hair.” Like the assimilation the morning announcements mandated, Theodore started rejecting her culture and straightening her hair. 

Now, in her first-ever hair show, she reclaimed the parts of herself she tried to bury years ago. Models in big blush and mascara (a makeup look headed by her sister, Laura Theodore) wore hair sculptures braided in the shape of the bows she used to get bullied for. Some models had oversized braided bows tied around their neck like bow ties, while others had them teased and pinned on their shoulders or fixed on top of a bun. 

“Some pieces took half a day, while others ones took three days,” she says about the looks, which ranged from cornrows to sculptures and even a braided bridal veil. Using weave, glue, and a lot of hairspray, her first-ever hair show took inspiration from Jawara Wauchope’s Black Hair Reimagined and even had hairstylists from the show, like Vernon Francois, sitting front row. 

To present Untied, Theodore was selected as the recipient of the Instagram Draft Fund, an annual program giving creators access to resources to live out their imagination. When the Meta team reached out, “they said, ‘Do you have an idea that you’ve had sitting in your head and haven’t been able to make it come to life?” she recalled in an emotional speech after the show. “I really felt like that was God.” 

While she’s been working on the 32-look collection for three months, two of those months she was testing out a completely new braiding technique. But, “it didn’t work,” she says. “In the last month, I had to go back to what I usually do and build outward from there.” Writing down then sketching out her hair sculptures, she’s been braiding the story of her Haitian-American childhood all summer. 

By the end of the show, Theodore walked out and traded places with the little girl in the school desk chair. All grown up, she wore a red, paper doll-like Pipenco Lorena dress and a bow hairpiece with long, train-like hair ribbons which left her audience in a tear-shedding standing ovation. “I wanted to show people I lived this,” she says. “This is my life.” 

Author: India Espy-Jones

Read the original article on Essence.