Oribe, the Legendary Hairstylist Who Created a Thousand Supermodels, Has Died
It’s impossible to think about fashion and beauty without thinking about Oribe. The legendary hairstylist, who has died at 62, is one of the main reasons that runway hair and makeup became big business, wrote The New York Times in 1992, after he sent top models down Chanel’s Spring runway that year with mussed-up bouffants so expertly tossed and disheveled they raised nearly as many eyebrows as the clothes. He’d do it again the following Spring season, this time for Marc Jacobs’s infamous Perry Ellis collection, only suddenly bombshell lengths got gritty—a look that, coupled with clashing prints and untied combat boots on that runway, helped catapult the idea of “grunge” into the mainstream, with women suddenly begging their stylists for hair that was less glamazon and “a little more greasy-looking,” according to stylist Frederic Fekkai.
Born in Cuba in 1956 before arriving in the U.S. as a child, Oribe Canales would make and break trends over and over again, on runways and in countless campaigns and cover editorials for the likes of Vogue, collaborating with such iconic image-makers as Steven Meisel, François Nars, Richard Avedon, Gianni Versace, Kevyn Aucoin, and Annie Leibovitz. And of course, there was his gang of girls turned one-name wonders: Christy, Linda, Naomi—the rise of the va-va-voom ’90s supermodel owed much, quite literally, to his great and talented hands.
Leaving behind a legacy that includes his Fifth Avenue salon at Elizabeth Arden, which he opened in 1991, as well as an eponymous line of styling products beloved the world over by backstage professionals and his expansive celebrity clientele—Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Penélope Cruz—Oribe will be remembered as a master of his craft, conjuring the kind of unapologetic glamour that spoke to the world’s most alluring women. And yet perhaps it was his relationship with Jennifer Lopez—who, after long admiring Oribe’s work in Vogue, hired him for her debut album, 1999’s On the 6—that transformed him from fashion insider to Hollywood go-to and eventually a household name in his own right; the pair would go on to travel the world together for more than a decade.
In an Instagram post today, Lopez credited the larger-than-life hairstylist with defining her signature look and remembered his profound charisma, humor, optimism, and kindness: “[Oribe] made me love the glam part of things. Bc he loved it so much and saw it as a powerful tool to empower women. He loved beauty and wanted women to feel beautiful and sexy. He loved the messiness and the imperfection and saw how interesting that was. He was a true artist.”
