HAIR PEACE EXHIBITION
HAIR PEACE EXHIBITION
On November 20, 2025, La Caserne, Europe’s largest incubator dedicated to fashion and responsible creation, will host HAIR PEACE, a photographic exhibition by Frédéric Monceau.
Inspired by the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, born in Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, this project places hair at the heart of an artistic manifesto. A symbol of freedom, identity, and resistance, hair becomes a visual language, a sculptural material, and a banner of emancipation.
Through a series of black and white photographs, the exhibition brings together international figures such as Rose McGowan alongside emerging and anonymous faces. Each image approaches hair both as an intimate expression and as a political gesture, balancing between fashion aesthetics and social manifesto. This dual reading, deliberately open, grants the viewer the freedom to experience it as a purely aesthetic encounter or as a space for deeper reflection.
Set within the raw concrete showroom of La Caserne, monumental prints and immersive back projections create a unique sensory journey, where the intimate meets the collective, and where beauty becomes resistance.
Hair is never neutral. At times an ornament of seduction, at times a sign of belonging, it runs through history as a shifting symbol of freedom, revolt, or control. It is veiled, hidden, cut, or released, yet it always tells something about us.
In 2022, the death of Mahsa Amini, arrested in Iran for wearing her veil “improperly,” turned hair into a global banner. The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” spread like a rallying cry, and the acts of women cutting their hair before cameras became the image of universal defiance. As philosopher Elisabeth Badinter wrote, “Women’s freedom always depends on control over their bodies.” In this struggle, hair emerged as a silent weapon, a thread of resistance.
With HAIR PEACE, Frédéric Monceau seizes this symbol and shifts it onto both artistic and political ground. Hair here becomes sculptural matter, living matter: monumental wigs, entangled strands, extravagant volumes that transform each subject into a totem. Black and white, radical and timeless, heightens this tension, stripping away the distraction of color to focus the gaze on texture, lines, and the intensity of eyes.
Through this series, Frédéric Monceau offers a double reading. For some, these will be fashion images, graphic and captivating visions that play with aesthetics and beauty. For others, they will become a social and political manifesto, an invitation to reflect on freedom, identity, and self-acceptance.
Because hair is both intimate and universal. In biblical mythology, Samson loses his strength when his hair is cut. In colonial history, entire peoples were shaved to humiliate them. In Afro-descendant culture, natural hair, long stigmatized, has become a symbol of pride and the reclaiming of identity. As Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie states, “Hair is political.”
Thus, every subject photographed becomes more than a model: a figure of resistance, a body that assumes, asserts, and claims. “Hair is a powerful element of identity and self-expression, a symbol of cultural pride, of resistance, and of resilience.”
HAIR PEACE is an exhibition about hair, but above all an exhibition about freedom. The freedom to choose one’s appearance, to declare who one is, or to refuse what others try to impose. As Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “To be free is not to do what one wants, but to want what one does.”
Here, hair becomes what we make of it: a manifesto.
“To be free is not to do what one wants, but to want what one does.”
Since the very beginning of my journey in photography, I have given special importance to hair and makeup. This attention has allowed me to build exceptional relationships with the artists who work by my side, makeup artists and hair stylists who, over time, have become friends, a second family.
With experience, I came to understand that hair is far more than a detail: it is memory, a thread stretched between the intimate and the world.
In this work, I wanted to photograph this living matter as breath, as banner, as armor at times, or even as a cry. Not to impose a message, but to let appear what escapes us. Hair speaks what the mouth keeps silent, because in the end, it is a choice. And every choice is a declaration of identity. I believe deeply that we do not pretend to be, we do what we are. Hair then becomes our shadows, our flags, our invisible scars.
Each image was born of an encounter. Behind each subject lies a story: of beauty, of pain, of freedom, of transformation. I photographed beings who borrowed characters and emotions that were not theirs, like actors stepping into a role. But to play, one must always draw from the truth that sleeps within. So I dare to hope I captured their fragments, that fragile part we so often hide and which, paradoxically, is the very source of our strength.
HAIR PEACE is not a slogan. It is a suggestion. A whisper, an invitation to reflection. It is the quiet breath that encourag on es us to accept being seen as we are, in our diversity, our excesses, our contradictions. It is an invitation to look at ourselves differently, to remember that freedom is made of tiny strands which, together, form an eternal head of hair.
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Frederic Monceau
