Ines Rowe has a rule she brought home from fashion shoots: if a look needs the year to explain it, it’s wrong. Hair goes back so the face can be seen. The red is chosen for the bride’s undertone, not the season. Skin stays skin, with its texture still there under the light.
She grew up in Berwyn, where her mother set hair in the kitchen on Saturday mornings and Ines swept up. In 2013 she talked her way onto a catalog shoot in Fulton Market as a third assistant. After that came magazines and lookbooks in Chicago and New York: slick hair, strong lips, twelve-hour days under strobes, a lot of standing.
Brides started asking after a stylist friend’s wedding in 2018. She said yes to four that summer and found she liked it more than the shoots. “A wedding is one face, one day, and the pictures get looked at for forty years,” she says. “A trend photographs well for about two.”
“If you can tell the year from the hair, I did it wrong.”
So she takes about thirty weddings a year and no more, which means every one gets the whole morning. The bride and up to five in the party sit in her chair. A bigger party brings a second artist she has worked with for years, at the same rate.
Trials run two hours at her West Loop studio, six to eight weeks out. She takes pictures by the window and again with a flash, because a lip that looks right in daylight can go orange under a photographer’s strobe. The red they find goes home with the bride.
About a third of her brides wear no red at all. The idea stays the same either way: a clean line at the hairline, brows brushed up, skin that still looks like skin from two feet away. Lashes she talks most people out of.
