Charlotte Mensah — Community Matters

Splinters, days before her sixteenth birthday. Charlotte Mensah started at the first Black salon in Britain in 1986, trained under Winston Isaacs at the London College of Fashion, and has run Hair Lounge on Portobello Road for twenty-five years. Community Matters opens at Ladbroke Hall on September 8 and closes on the 13th. The detail that decides it: the curator, Madeleine Haddon of V&A East, is a client, and so is the exhibition designer. A retrospective assembled by the people who sat in the chair is a different object from one assembled about them. Forty years, three Afro Hairdresser of the Year titles, first Black woman in the British Hairdressing Hall of Fame. The show is six days long.