Perfunctory white spaces that have the air of a soulless steelyard or freezing airport hangers are de rigueur when it comes to New York fashion week show venues, such is their potential for curation and embodying the designer’s aesthetic.  

And yet, they fail to showcase what’s really at the heart of New York: the Vaudevillian, velvet-soaked, smoke-filled nightlife. It was refreshing then, to enter inside the moody underworld of Alice and Olivia’s New York show venue, an old jazz club with rickety wooden tables, a tiny stage with a jazz band setting up and smokey-red carpets, curtains and candles. 

‘There’s a vampish, Victoriana mood to it. It’s dark but not too dark – it’s still beautiful,’ explained Matthew Curtis, lead hair stylist for Tresemme. ‘There’s a fantasy to it, a sense of the fairy tale, I guess you call it a Hansel & Gretel theme; it’s this girl in this weird place, a dark fairy tale but with innocence at its core.’

‘Big, curly, wild brushed out curls,’ which he then set with Tresemme 24 Hour Body Finishing Spray. ‘Then, I’m pin-curling the front section and teasing it back until it’s almost like candy floss – verging on avant-garde.'

It is, quite simply, the antithesis of what has defined beauty at the New York shows over the last few seasons; understated, austere and androgynous. And there’s a welcome impudence to that. Beauty is fantasy, and that’s been lost of late. It’s cheering to see it return to the frontline of fashion, despite the fact that big old candy floss hair might be a little too far from our collective comfort zone, it breeds happiness all the same.