At 2024’s Coachella Weekend 1, Doja Cat made history as the first female rapper to headline the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival – now dubbed the “Influencer Playground”. Doja Cat took the audience on a ‘hair journey’, starting with an army of 23 ‘hair monsters’, dressed in blonde hair suits, that moved in unison across the stage, creating a platinum blonde visual masterpiece.
Speaking to Vogue, Doja’s stylist and creative director Brett Alan Nelson reflected on when they first started planning her set in November 2023 saying: “She had some insane ideas about hair, muscles and bones.”
Charlie Le Mindu was tasked with creating Doja’s hair costumes, and alongside his team created 23 hair suits. Finding enough, ethically sourced, hair that was also of a high enough quality to dye blonde was an important part of the process Le Mindu shared whilst speaking to Dazed Beauty: “I need to know that my hair dealer gets the hair from good sources, that the people who give their hair get benefits from it, get money from it.” Over a week, Le Mindu, his team and a group from the Paris College of Arts dyed 400 kilos of hair.
The rapper and singer wanted to challenge the stereotypes of masculinity through her set and for the audience to feel like they had travelled through her hair and into her mind. To illustrate this her costumes evolved to reveal bones shades, faux fur and less hair during the course of the set. “I wanted this show to feel like a textural fever dream. Almost like you’ve fallen into my hair and dove through my head and into my thoughts.”
Doja is also set to surprise festival goers with an upgrade to the costumes for weekend two, Le Mindu teases: “It’s not an upgrade! Because they were already beautiful, but just a little change. We don’t know yet.”
