Last season it was those (let's face it, pretty unwearable) flicky blonde wigs. Today, at the Grand Palais, Chanel put forth an entirely new nomadic, urban hippie direction for autumn hair. 

To parlay with the rustic-looking tweeds and textures in the collection, piles upon piles of carefully constructed hair pieces were affixed onto middle-parted, low ponytails until they looked as if they carried the weight of, fittingly, a small tree. It took Sam McKnight's mammoth team of hair stylists hours to perfect the ragamuffin dreaded look on 74 models. 

So, how did he do it? 'I exaggerated a simple pony and blew it up on proportion and detail,' explained McKnight via his Instagram. 'I incorporated crimped extensions, braided hair in multicoloured Chanel tweed rags, lace and pearls.' He created a dry-matte texture with Fudge Sea Salt Spray and Oribe Dry Texturising Spray, 'to create a dry volume.' This is serious hair handiwork, and of the sort of aesthetic persuasion that is entirely befitting the playful, rapscallion nature of Cara Delevigne. 

And quite frankly, it's a refreshing move away from the sleek, non-descript, visions of minimalism that autumn/winter14 hair has enjoyed over the last four weeks of the catwalk. If nothing else, there is something to it, and something is always more than, well, nothing. Will we adopt the look ourselves come September, probably not. But that's not the point. This is about a new direction for the over-arching hair mood, a step towards something that feels more lived-in, well-travelled, a little gypsy and sun-baked. We may not stitch tiny pieces of wripped tweed fabric around chunks of our hair (Chanel boucle? Perish the thought!) but what we may do is add a few haphazard tiny braids or shaggy twists fixed with hair gel. And that's just different enough.

On the other hand, Tom Pecheux, as a retort to last season's painterly butterfly wing eyes, toned things down a touch with his dialled down bright pastel eyelids, each girl had a subtly different variation of eye design; some were lime green and irridescent, others were diluted lime green with a mauve-y pink powder flick. Then, a couple of models were given a splurge of orange. Or fizzy pastel pink. 

It's an odd thing that so many of us counter Chanel as the epitome of all that is elegant, monochromatic and restrained, and yet, judging by beauty behind the scenes of the Chanel catwalk these past several seasons, it's anything but. It's alive, rambunctious and artful. And as such, has far more in common with the young fashion purveyor of now, than the Chanel matrons of old.