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Hair: Luis Alvarez, VP creative director and co-founder, Aquage
Photography: Luis Alvarez for Aquage
Hair tech: Lauren Reminick
Make-up: Wanda Alvarez
Fashion styling: Patric Chauvez

This holiday season caps a new, year-long chapter of fascination with The Great Gatsby and the opulent style F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel and now Baz Luhrmann’s updated movie represent.

Like so many artists, Luis Alvarez and the Aquage team were inspired by the trend—but not by the bobs, finger waves or feathers—rather, the cultural energy of the time.

Alvarez says, “We wondered, ‘What if Gatsby was published in the year 3000 instead of 1925?’ What would his theme of extreme excess, hyper-elegance and 24/7 frenzy of festivities look like?”

We will never know for sure, but thanks to Alvarez and the Aquage team’s vision to create art-deco inspired, futuristic party headpieces like Geo (left) and Nautilus (right) using only a flatiron, Aquage Working Spray, human hair wefts and a lot of imaginative artistry, we can catch a glimpse.

JAZZ IMPROV

Alvarez encourages stylist to take inspiration from classic works of art, but to “look beyond the literal physical reference and instead, create something authentic that captures its essence and spirit.”

He sees elements of classic Asian art in many Art Deco, jazz era designs, so he used those to influence these Xen and Bonsai looks in the GATSB 3000 collection. For all four designs, he employed the polar opposite of “excess”—using his favorite tool, the flatiron, and one essential holiday styling product, Aquage Working Spray.

“You don’t know where you can take a look—whether you can dial it up or dial it down— unless you take it to the threshold,” he says. “Until you know how far you can go, you don’t really intimately know a product or technique.

“But if you can take an iron and working spray and do these fantasy looks for yourself, of course you can work a little bump in the crown for your clients,” he explains. “Giving them a great holiday style will seem effortless.”

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