It Was Shear Art : The World’s Top Hairstylists Clip, Snip, Add and Subtract Locks for a Good Cause

Letting five of the world’s top hairstylists loose with instructions to go Dada can make women go gaga. Sebastian International’s d.a.d.a. (Designing Artists Designing for AIDS) fund-raiser Monday for AIDS Project Los Angeles was hair as performance art. Or, maybe, just like the anti-art Dada movement in the early 1900s, it was an anti-hair show.

One thing’s for sure: A knack for wielding the shears can elevate you to a new plane.

“We think he’s God,” said a model whose long hair was about to be shorn by Bruno Pittini, a.k.a. “the professor.”

Frighteningly quick with the scissors, Pittini performed three clip jobs before the bell-bottomed, platform-wearing audience in about 12 minutes, leaving behind a pile of hair that looked like autumn leaves.

“My God, did he just like totally chop her head off?” asked one woman. “I wasn’t watching.”

But most of the audience was--responding with a slight gasp, then applause when a long, thick clump of hair fell to the floor.

“I totally trust him,” said another shorn model relaxing backstage.

What happens to a model’s career when her sexy long hair gets chopped into a do reminiscent of “Peter Pan”?

“Agents freak, but you get more jobs.”

The stylists in the Long Beach show, which raised more than $150,000 for APLA, are “editorial” hairstylists whose work for magazines, ads and fashion shows has made them famous.

“Women really look at models like icons,” said Geri Cusenza, creative director of Sebastian and the force behind the show. “All women want their hair to look like editorial hair.”

Pittini wasn’t the only deity in the pantheon of stylists. Backstage at the Terrace Theatre, a woman moved out of the way at Frederic Fekkai’s operating room with this advice: “Go in and talk to God.”

Fekkai, who has a salon at Bergdorf Goodman in New York and includes on his client roster Sigourney Weaver (probably not for “Alien 3”) and Daryl Hannah, did the most conventional styles. There were bobs and baby curls and Jackie O. looks.

“I want the hair to relate to the body,” said the soft-spoken Fekkai. “I want it to be flattering to eyes, nose, bone structure.”

But, really, this was d.a.d.a., Frederic. Enough with hair you can wear.

Robert Lobetta got it: He used paper, metal, wood and, finally, hair that didn’t look like hair.

Lobetta said he wanted to apply the Dada movement to the head, taking found objects and reusing them in a different way.

The paper dreadlocks came from “a magazine I didn’t like.” Old watch pieces and scrap copper became a heavy-metal shag. Wood shavings looked like blond curls. Hair woven into a strange sort of spider web rested on a bald head.

While it may not exactly be career dressing, Lobetta says he could see people wearing different materials on their head.

Not so with any styles in Sam McKnight’s show, a disco extravaganza.

“This is a few steps further than wearable,” said McKnight. “It’s a ‘70s spoof. Early ‘70s, before it develops into full-blown disco, which was really tragic.”

McKnight, who has had more than 20 Vogue covers, combined neons and pastels, Afros and big hair and bigger hair (if you call back-combed petrochemicals hair) on models.

McKnight doesn’t have a salon, but does have a few clients like Princess Di (she uses Sebastian’s molding mud), Uma Thurman and Isabella Rossellini. He says he’s planning to open a salon in London this year.

Arriving late was the highest of the hair holies: Oribe. One would have to wait months and fork over $250 for his touch at the Elizabeth Arden salon in New York.

Rising from the floor of the stage with a Christy Turlington-esque dummy and a tub of nuclear green goo, the black-vinyl-clad Oribe (pronounced OR-BAY) dumped handfuls of the goo on the hair (“It’s like straw,” he said) and hacked away.

“I think he’s making fun of Bruno Pittini,” said someone in the next row.