Zhou Xue Ming styles the stars’ hair

At 9 p.m. in Shanghai, Zhou Xue Ming remains at his workspace. The 34-year-old hairstylist and wig artist often works late—mornings belong to his one-year-old son, evenings to the studio where wigs hang from walls, balance on stands, and gather in corners like exotic birds not yet ready to fly.

The studio as a living sketchbook

Zhou’s Pudong studio feels like controlled chaos. Light pours through crooked Venetian blinds, casting long shadows across a black rubber floor he installed in 2018. The Huangpu River sits nearby, though the view is blocked. What he notices instead is the evening light.

“During sunset it’s beautiful,” he says. “I look out when I need inspiration.”

Related: Enid Marx’s playful home shaped her fabrics

He began making wigs at home, but as his designs grew more ambitious—some now reaching two meters tall—space became an issue. His recent pieces require multiple people to lift onto a wearer. Against the walls, old wigs are fixed to canvases, no longer meant to be worn but kept as art.

“My wigs have a lot of shapes,” he says. “Naturally, they are all art.”

In Mandarin, he calls a wig a máo pēi—a rough shell. “Like a house with nothing inside,” he explains. Each one starts as a blank, dyed, cut, and reshaped through trial and error. If a design fails, he sets it aside. A single private book in the studio records past wigs, a catalog of experiments to revisit.

Related: Emily Tobin on curiosity and perception

The room is rarely tidy. “As soon as I have a new idea, I act on it immediately,” he says. Metal shelves hold works in progress. From the ceiling hang larger pieces in straw, hair, nets, braids, and foil. A blue trolley holds heads, combs, sprays, and scraps. A plastic bucket contains a tangle of blow dryers—”almost all broken from use.”

Zhou grew up in Shouxian County, Anhui Province, where his family ran a restaurant. At school, he styled his own hair upright in a punk-inspired look. The 1996 film Trainspotting, with its ragged crops and buzz cuts, influenced him deeply. “It blew my mind when I first saw it,” he says. After school, he trained at a local barber’s.

Today, his work appears in international campaigns, runway shows, and fashion magazines. For Mugler’s spring/summer 2025 show in Paris, he created vision-obscuring hairpieces worn by models—and by Cardi B in the front row.

Related: Unique Library Showcases Hundreds of Paintbrushes

Wigs serve a practical purpose for Zhou. They let him transform a model quickly without the constraints of natural hair. “If you use a model’s own hair, it’s very difficult to do many things in a short time,” he says. A wig can be dyed, cut, sculpted, and replaced in minutes.

Buckets become molds; glue guns fix sequins and jewels into hair. “I’ve heard there is a smell,” he says, “but I’ve been used to it for many years.”

For Zhou, wigs also act as disguise. Beyond the studio door,