The ’60s proverb, “the higher the hair, the closer to God” couldn’t be more applicable to wig and session stylist Sarah Necia. It is quite apt that a version of this well-worn phrase is often apocryphally attributed to one of her superstar clients: icon and country music legend Dolly Parton.
On arriving at Sarah’s Kentish Town studio, a space she shares with friends Adèle Mildred and Gabrielle Djanogly, the duo behind Hood London (and a relationship she affectionately refers to as her “coven”), you are immediately confronted with a wall of extravagantly-styled wigs. There’s an exaggeratedly tall, triple-stacked pigtailed number: one of an impressive 24 wigs she created for Richard Quinn’s autumn/winter 2021 collection; a feathery, marine-hued mullet sits next to an immaculately coiffed, jet-black pageboy – created for none other than Dita Von Teese. “She has a few wigs, but I mostly just do her hair,” Sarah, who hails from Derby, tells me with her trademark enthusiasm. “I cut her hair into a horseshoe,” she explains – the base haircut for any number of classic 20th-century styles (including Dita’s iconic pageboy) that are the focus of Necia’s expert practice.
Her work predominantly draws techniques and aesthetics from the period between the ’40s and the ’80s, a span of decades enveloping not just a golden era of Hollywood, but a golden age of hair. “Everything starts with a basic [roller] set,” she begins. “Out of any look, it could be contemporary, anything, it all [starts] with a really good, solid set… In hair, even the ’90s hair has a bit of ’60s influence. The [Pamela Anderson] is kind of a Bardot. Even a horseshoe cut translates all the way to an ’80s hairdo. Then you’ve got the ’60s: the Beatles cut. Then you have the ’70s, and then it gets looser again… it’s the base for a lot of things.”
Sarah’s love affair with hair began when she started training at 16, but it was not always an easy ride – nor a straightforward career path. “I absolutely loved doing hair competitions, but I was just told that I didn’t fit the right vibe [for the industry].” She found herself unable to get jobs at traditional hairstylists because of her tattoos. “That’s how it was, not even that long ago – to me, coming from a small town. People were not into it.”
Her ascent to the upper echelons of wigcraft is partly down to Dita. “She reached out to me on Instagram, and was like, ‘I love your work,’ she explains. “I was working at a hospital back then, with dementia patients, and I was on a 12-hour shift. She said, ‘Come to Milan.’ I had some savings from starting to do more wigs and hair, and [so I took] my last bit of them and I went to Milan to do the Mika show with Dita.” The rest, as they say, is history.
“I had done fashion week before, but she was the main [catalyst], and someone that had similar interests and [tastes.]” Since then Sarah’s talent and taste for vintage tresses have brought her into the orbit of a number of household names: Rita Ora, Alexa Demie, Aimee Lou Wood, Raye, and the inimitable Dolly Parton among them. “I didn’t think anything of it,” she explains of how Dolly’s niece, Rebecca, reached out for a wig for herself for a Graham Norton Christmas TV appearance with her aunt, which was being filmed on location at Dollywood. Dolly and her long-term hairstylist Cheryl Riddle were so impressed by the wig, they sent two to Sarah to style as a trial. “So I washed them, cut them, styled them… and she was really pleased.” What has blossomed since is a beautiful working relationship, which has seen Dolly FaceTiming Sarah to model her work for her.
Still, Necia’s job is not all stars, satin sheen and pin-curl dreams; it is frequently laborious, frustrating hard work – hours of trial and error with no guaranteed success. “I fucking punched it over!” she exclaims, referring to one particularly difficult moment working on a wig for the Richard Quinn show – a production she was tasked with making 24 wigs for in the space of two weeks. “My husband was like: ‘You need to take a breath.’ So I did,” she laughs. “I apologised to my husband, I apologised to the mannequin, and I apologised to the wig.”
What does the future hold for Necia’s Hair? She’s worked on the hair for Dolly’s recently announced Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones, an in-depth exploration of her fashion through the decades, as well as on some other projects she’s keeping mum about for the moment. As for people she’d like to work with, Florence Pugh springs to mind. “But I never really give myself that [pressure] either,” Sarah continues. “I think it’s important to have aspirations, but you kind of just go with [the flow.]”
