Orlando Pita, Top Creative Fashion Hairstylist
June 7, 2015Orlando Pita is responsible for some of the most creative looks that you’ll see on the catwalks today. He’s worked with Prada, Dior, Valentino, Versace, Vera Wang, Fendi, Kors, Gucci, YSL, Derek Lam and many more designers.
Orlando Pita, hairstylist
Incredibly creative, he’s also the first hairstylist to be honoured in Cooper-Hewitt’s “National Design Triennial” in 2006. As well as catwalk work, Orlando Pita s works with top magazines – Allure, Vogue (American, Italian & French), and W. and in 2007, Orlando was named one of the most influential people in the world of fashion by W Magazine. The photographers he has worked with include Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Steven Meisel, Mario Testino, and Craig McDean.
Orlando Pita- Celebrity favourite
Orlando Pita has also worked with many celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, Beyonce, Madonna, Jennifer Connelly, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jennifer Lopez, and Julianne Moore and now he has his own salon in New York now, called “Orla” where he has trained a team to replicate his looks.
You can even book the celebrity hairstylist yourself, if you have a few hundred dollars to spare and can cope with the waiting list. If not, there’s always his specially developed hair care line, which is very highly regarded by users. But if you ask him for tips on how to get his look at home, the hair maestro, who dislikes being interrupted at work in order to give interviews, may give you short shift.
“Most of the things I do, I try to do so a woman can’t do it at home, so I still have a job.”
Orlando Pita – practicing since childhood
He practiced at home as a child on the heads of his family, and when his first ever haircut, which was on his brother, went wrong, and his brother needed to be rushed to the hairdresser to have it fixed as an emergency creative casualty, he was raring to have another go immediately.
It was actually the same brother who, many years later, got him started in professional hairdressing. He’d had a bit more practice by then, but still wasn’t formally trained or licence, when the actual hairdresser cancelled on a shoot his sibling was working on and Orlando Pita got the call to fill in – with great success.
Shortly after that he got himself an agent and then moved to Paris, working with top photographers and creating styles that were totally avante-garde – a skill that frustratingly fell flat on his return to his native New York, where they were looking for pretty hairstyles. No worries, he quickly learned that too and now he can flip from one to the other, and he says he doesn’t prefer one or the other.
Inspired hairstyles
Orlando Pita likes both the satisfaction of making a woman feel beautiful, of stepping away from a styling session and seeing how happy he’s made her, and of thinking through new ideas and getting new inspiration. Which could be from anything, not necessarily hair trends.
“It could be a building, the way a letter is written or a certain swirl that I think would be nice to replicate in hair,” he says.
