Good, Bad and Ugly Hair Days Gel at This High-Tress Olympics

WASHINGTON —  People are looking at me, and it’s not necessarily a good look. They’ve seen my head, and they’re casing the joint. Not a good place to have a bad hair day.

On this August weekend, more than 50,000 stylists are milling through the Washington Convention Center sampling the odd matinee that is HairWorld ‘96, where the professionals come to learn about the styles that will define fashion for the next two years.

The standard is high, and my $13 ‘do doesn’t do.

“Too much gel,” says a woman at the Wella booth.

“Uneven sideburns,” says a heavyset stylist from Massapequa, N.Y., who has none himself.

I don’t take this seriously until I encounter Carmelo Gugliotti, an Italian-born hairdresser from New Haven, Conn., and one of the U.S. jurors in the men’s hair competition.

“You can read someone from the way they wear their hair,” Gugliotti says, and proceeds to “You want me to be honest? You sure?”

“You are American.” True. “Don’t make too much money.” Depends. “You are not too well-bred.” Hmmm. “You don’t care who does your hair and you don’t spend too much on it, probably at Supercuts.” True, true and false.

Then, shaking his head dolefully, he sums up: “It doesn’t look good.”

And with a toss of his own perfectly coiffed head, Gugliotti sweeps off to judge some people whose job it is to be tressed to kill.

For makers of hair products, HairWorld ’96 is consumer heaven. But the stylists come, too, for something more dramatic. This is where the best compete in the world championships of hairstyling, where men and women from 32 countries toil to turn other men and women into examples of what the dead cells that sit atop the human head should look like in 1996.

This “Hair Olympics” comes complete with a march of nations and a three-tiered dais where award-winners receive medals, hear their national anthems and receive hugs from their stunning creations.

Above it all stands Ivan Levinger, the hawk-like master of ceremonies for this year’s competition. Like a color man at a football game, he provides a melodramatic soundtrack to the competition.

“This,” says Levinger to no one in particular, “is art.”

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HairWorld ’96 billed itself as “the monumental experience of the decade,” and in a small way it was: The hype of the actual event lived up to the hype of the ads.

This is the strange nether world where Joe’s Barber Shop meets French haute couture, where Middle America’s beauticians encounter high style and take some gels, sprays and progressive ideas home for the masses, where the trickle-down theory of hair fashion is going full blast.

All the big names are here--Paul Mitchell, Wella, Revlon, L’Oreal. Everybody is scurrying around in wireless headphone mikes, giving orders, striking poses, styling hair and talking about styling hair. A company called Zotos, which makes permanent waves and other hair-care products, fields an avant-garde show with vampirish performers in flowing white capes, claws, stilts and Medusa hair.

“At an event like this, you’re always going to see the furthest end of things,” says Susan Budman of Zotos. “We’re appealing to hairdressers here. They want to come to a hair show and see the extreme. Then they take it back and translate it for their customers.”

Downstairs, at more scaled-down tables, companies sell haircutting scissors, “no tweeze” body wax and those awful posters of coiffed models you see during haircuts. American Salon magazine offers a chance to “list your salon on the INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY for FREE.” The site’s name, naturally: “HairNet.”

In the L’Oreal prep area, perfectly coiffed, cream-faced models sit on the floor in front of mirrors eating salad at 9 a.m., waiting for their turns on the stage upstairs.

But stage is an understatement. L’Oreal has erected a gargantuan pavilion modeled after a French street (“Rue Royale”) with working Parisian street lights, winding staircases and bleachers. The project is said to have cost more than $1 million. It is packed elbow to elbow.

The performances are pop culture cross-pollination embodied--the blending of dance, Broadway musical, swing, reggae, house music, ‘80s glam rock and goth all coming together in a weird, cosmetic-inspired hybrid.

All for hair.

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Stung by my recent dressing down, I gather my bruised ego about me, with help from Zetta Alley and Candi Ekstrom.

“It doesn’t look so bad,” assures Alley, an Oregon hairdresser.

“Don’t worry about it,” says Ekstrom, from Florida. “Look who you’re competing with.”

Fortunately, she has a point. The 92 male models being coiffed for competition are visions of hair perfection an anchorman would die for. Puffy pompadours. Goatees so perfect they look tattooed. Sideburns sharp enough to break skin. Beards shaped into forks and curlicues, and tops so flat you could serve a sandwich on them. One meticulously curled head resembles raw ramen noodles. A single stray hair can mean defeat.

On the other side of the stage, women wear the exaggerated makeup of fashion models. There are three different competitions: “consumer day,” “hair by night” and “progressive,” each more radical than the previous.

The stylists are performing incredible gravity-defying feats, but the women seem secondary--mere easels for hair.

Many of the women this year are Asian. Japan’s strong showing--world champion the last five years--has led many non-Asian countries to procure Asian models: Austria’s three models this year are South Korean.

Ann Bray of Huntsville, Ala., trained the 1984 U.S. championship team and is a sort of Bela Karolyi of hair. She’s spent years trying to make the competition more utilitarian. She worries, too, that the Americans’ outlook damages their chances--the subconscious notion that even high-fashion hair must have some practicality.

“We know this isn’t going to be worn by the public,” she says, “but we hope that, more and more, it’ll be the kind of thing that hairdressers can see and break down into skills a client can appreciate.”

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Rick Quessenberry has come a long way for this moment, as he has many times before, and he is too seasoned, too cool to let a little matter like a dropped comb slow him down.

As fluidly as an infielder grabbing a grounder, he sweeps it from the floor and returns to his focus--a young woman named Sabine Alvarado, the human clay from which he is building a sculpture of hair.

Dramatic electronic music pulsates. Hundreds are watching, but Quessenberry is unperturbed. Pins in mouth, one hand’s fingers busy with precision pinching of locks, he draws a can of hair spray with the other and fires. Sabine--she goes by her first name--doesn’t flinch.

Clouds of gunk rise into the air as Quessenberry works against the clock to finish a sprig that protrudes from Sabine’s head like an erect weeping willow.

“He beats up on my hair with a round brush all day long and I’m still smiling,” says Sabine, 30.

And in a flourish of spray, the “hair by night” event is over. Bibs fall to reveal beauties in outfits that, anywhere else, would be considered on the far end of provocative--revealed navels, jutting chests.

As he retires from competition, Quessenberry, 42, knows that his customers in Springfield, Mo., will not want to look like Sabine. No matter.

The golden-haired, affable man comes from a family of hairstylists. He has been doing hair since age 12 and grew up in Mansfield, Mo., an agricultural community of 1,100, sitting on a kitchen cabinet watching his mother do neighbors’ hair.

The United States won the gold in 1984 in Las Vegas for both ladies and men, but hasn’t been in the top 20 since the late 1980s. Quessenberry will place 12th in hair by night, fifth in consumer day and 11th in progressive. The United States places fourth overall in the women’s category. Japan wins the women’s again, followed by Austria.

“As far as I can remember, I’ve done hair. I can’t imagine doing anything else,” Quessenberry says. “It’s wonderful being out here competing, but there is hair waiting for me back home.”