BENTONVILLE, Ark. — The biannual NWA Fashion Week, hosted by the nonprofit Interform began its first day this season with a panel called "Hair Chronicles," which highlighted how the beauty industry is becoming more inclusive to all textures.
The panel is in many ways about entrepreneurship in the textured hair space and how beauty and fashion intersect. Panelists shared stories about adapting and evolving to serve more people with varying hair needs.
The panel also featured entrepreneurs who started black-owned beauty brands while trying to earn bigger visibility and shelf space at Walmart.
"The hair chronicles panel is specifically about creating that space for these founders to get in front of an audience and talk about their journey... Textured hair has not been properly represented on the beauty aisle and we're changing that," said Interform CEO and founder Robin Atkinson.
"Having Walmart come together with us on this project and say, 'let's look at skin tone issues on the runway, let's look at how at New York fashion week, maybe they're only prepared to work with straight hair backstage,'" Atkinson recalled.
With the fashion and beauty industry evolving all the time it's important for hairstylists and makeup artists to know how to do all skin tones and hair types.
"Because even if we look at the future of the general person, we see that they're going to have a mixture of ethnicities in their life so we have to know how to do any and all hair types, no matter the length, no matter the texture, no matter the ethnicity of the person, hair is very important, " Hair Stylist Ashton Dixon said.
Dixon has done hair for the NWA fashion shows for the past few years and has been a stylist for 10 years, and she says knowing all hair types helped her become a versatile stylist.
"If you do fashion shows it's important, if you do behind the chair it's important, and if you do editorials it's important because you don't want to be known as the stylist that can just do one type of hair," Dixon said.
Interform says the NWA Fashion Week has a mission to highlight fashion trends, burgeoning local brands, and up-and-coming designers in order to celebrate Northwest Arkansas’ growing culture and raise awareness and support for local organizations.
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