Following on from the divisive launch of Skims’s merkin, Kim Kardashian is continuing her hairy streak.
Kardashian’s night in London started with the premiere of her forthcoming Hulu series All’s Fair on Thursday (October 23), where she wore a custom Dilara Findikoglu croc dress with cut-away cups on the bust and a flowing cape. For the after-party and her 45th birthday celebrations, she changed into a sheer corset mini-dress. Glam was kept bronzed, with oil-spill black talon nails changed to a sheer satiny pink, and her hair slicked back in a tight bun, extra-long, teeny, tiny braids let down later.
But it was her final look of the evening where things got subversively hairy, at Mert Alas’s chic soirée at his London home, sipping Seventy One Golden Martinis and among friends including Kate Moss, FKA Twigs, Teyana Taylor, and John Galliano. The actor, mogul, and budding lawyer wore another Dilara Findikoglu look, from the fall 2025 Venus From Chaos collection. It features a braided hair bra and coordinating human hair braids draped over the hips and crotch. Her own hair, by celebrity hairstylist Dimitris Giannetos, was styled into tiny, Renaissance inspired braids, complementing the thicker pelts across her body.
Human hair has become a fashion fixation in recent times. At Collina Strada’s New York Fashion Week spring 2026 show, designer Hillary Taymour sent hairy beanies down the runway, while Schiaparelli and Simone Rocha have produced human hair accessories, neckties, and earrings. At Duran Lantink’s debut collection for Jean Paul Gaultier, graphic bodysuits of male pubic hair, hairy chests, and hairier bellies were on shocking display. At Coachella, hairstylist and creative director Charlie Le Mindu made blonde Cousin It-esque monsters out of Doja Cat’s back-up dancers, in line with his avant-garde, otherworldly hair looks.
You can trace fashion’s pubic hair purveyors all the way through the cultural zeitgeist, from the Tom Ford-era Gucci ad with a hairy G below the waistband (as shaped by hairstylist Orlando Pita) in 2004, to the “full bush in a bikini” TikTok trend earlier this year. Kardashian, it seems, noticed the growing trend early, and got to work.
One of the most striking uses of hair came in the form of Galliano’s last Margiela couture show, where models wore merkins underneath the translucent gowns. Ariana Grande opted for the ephemeral, metallic dress from the spring 2024 couture show, but opted not to sport the merkin. Bjork, however, went all-in on the look, posing on the cover of Vogue Scandinavia in the blurred tulle Margiela gown with a merkin wig, fashioned from real human hair and painstakingly embroidered to the crotch of an underlaid silk stocking bodysuit.
The look Kim Kardashian chose from Findikoglu was just one of many from the London-based Turkish design that features intricate hair braiding details, and Findikoglu’s hair-adorned designs have also found fans in others including Julia Fox. Eve in the Garden of Eden-like, Fox wore the transparent dress from Findikoglu’s spring 2023 collection to the 2025 Oscars after-party, with longtime hairstylist John Novotny styling her own hair in long, loose spirals through the gauzy gown. For Findikoglu, whose designs interrogate traditional modes of femininity and unspools them into powerfully sensually looks, hair acts as armor and invitation into her gothic underworld. Each look and each designer’s dalliance with hair has a vastly different effect and intention.
Skims’s $32 Faux Hair Micro String Thong launched (and immediately sold out) last week, available in 12 different hair-color and skin-tone combinations, and two hair types. “This is a marketing piece to get us talking, in keeping with the nipple bra,” as says beauty historian Rachael Gibson told Margaux Anbouba. “It feels uncomfortable to me to monetize and market bodily features as a punch line, which is what this feels like, as opposed to some kind of celebration of body hair, which it definitely isn’t.”
Kim Kardashian is on the record as being totally hairless from years of laser hair removal. While Kim could be experiencing a bit of hair envy as the trend cycle shifted, it’s more likely part of a shrewd business strategy to capitalize on society getting firmly—for now—back on team body hair.
