How Hair Wars legend Keith Matthews got his start
Longtime fantasy hair designer Keith Matthews, 69, of Beauty Village salon in Detroit, remembers the time he showed up to Hair Wars late back in 1997.
Although the event, a show featuring creatively outrageous hair styles sported by models, was a party in essence, there was no playing around when it came to the model call time. Each year, the show begins promptly at 6:05 p.m. Zero exceptions.
“Even though I came all the way from Detroit, Hump (event producer David Humphries) would not let me go on,” said Matthews. "He handed me some tickets and said ‘I’ll catch you at the next one,’ and I couldn’t say anything.”
Matthews did, in fact, go back many times over the next two decades.
Hair Wars returned this year(last Sunday) to the Ford Community and Performing Arts Center in Dearborn after a two-year pause due to the pandemic, and wasaptly called "Hair Stars and Hot Cars" — apt because it took place at the same time as the returning North American International Auto Show, down the street in Detroit.
People often mistake the colorful Hair Wars show for a trade show or a competition, but Humphries said its mission is solely to entertain.
“We started informally inside clubs and parties around 1981,” said Humphries, 66, who stumbled upon head-turning hairstyles while working as a concert promoter. “The (stylists) had nowhere, no platform to show off their work. All they really had was their front porch — so it just kind of took off.”
Matthews caters to regular customers and builds his fantasy designs — some almost reaching the height of his 5-year-old grandson — inside Beauty Village salon on Plymouth Road in Detroit, where photographs from more than three decades of runway shows line the walls like puzzle pieces. Each wig he builds costs Matthews roughly between $300 and $400, a price that accumulates from many trips back and forth to Michaels, Home Depot and Party City.
“Keith is always doing something different than what everybody else is doing,” said Raya York, 36, who has been modeling in Matthew’s shows since 2011.
But Matthews, a Detroit native, kicked off his hair journey with more simple styles: perms, curls and cuts. After being blacklisted from his high school swim team because of his conk hairstyle, Matthews started doing his friends' hair and sneaking off with his sister’s curling iron during the night. Then one day, a friend invited him to stop by a beauty school she had been studying at in Ann Arbor.
“That’s when it was chaos,” said Matthews, who noticed a woman whose hair came out from a French perm. “There was one Black instructor that worked there but she was out. I told the instructor I could cut and curl and she looked at me like I was crazy.”
Matthews, who was not a professional or even a student at the beauty school at the time, was allowed to curl and cut the woman’s hair in the back of the shop. She loved it — and Matthews surprised himself with the results. He was even more surprised when the owner asked him to come back in two weeks. “That’s how I ended up in beauty school,” said Matthews. “Other than that, I don’t know if I ever would have gone to beauty school.”
As products and practices have changed, Matthews stays rooted in his original teachings of hair analysis andhe still uses his reliable curling iron stove set. A change he would like to see is a young demographic of talent getting more involved with Hair Wars. Humphries hopes for that, too.
“We are working hard and have mentors for them,” said Humphries. “The younger generation hasn’t taken the torch and we’re trying to pass it to them.”
Until that day comes, hair legends like Matthews will continue to do what they best — create something to shock the crowd.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: How Hair Wars legend Keith Matthews got his start
