From salon walls to your phone: how Pinterest replaced the hairstyle catalog 📱🇨🇲

Cliquez ici pour lire en français

Before Pinterest, finding an idea for a hairstyle, a dress, a room makeover or even a house layout often meant looking around you. In hair salons, photos of styles hung on the walls. At the tailor’s, clients showed up with a picture cut out of a magazine, or with a garment that had already been made. Today, the phone has changed how people look for inspiration: a few words typed into an app can bring up dozens, even hundreds, of ideas.

Pinterest lets users search for and save ideas around fashion, home decor and house projects, among other things. The platform also offers searches that start from an image.

When you had to look at the wall 📸

In some hair salons, the décor barely changed: photos of cuts, braids, extensions and other styles were pinned up around the room. Clients could go through them one by one before choosing.

At the tailor’s, the process was different, but the idea was the same. Magazines, catalogs or photos served as references. A client could point to a dress worn by a model and ask the tailor to draw on it. For some people, the model came from a neighbor, a sister, a friend or a previous client. That habit has become less common, but the principle held: you had to see something to know what you wanted.

« It was a particular era, and you simply had to live it. To get a model for an outfit, a photo shoot or a decoration, we had printed catalogs on what was practically A3 paper. Today you can find a model of anything on the Internet, and that’s how brains no longer make the slightest effort, » recalls Aline Mbenga, a former user.

That search could take time, but it had a quirk: the models available depended largely on what the professional already had at hand.

The phone is the new catalog📱

With the Internet and smartphones, that search has gradually changed. Someone looking for a hairstyle no longer has to wait until they reach the salon to see what is on offer: they can search before leaving home. The same goes for clothes.

A bride-to-be can browse wedding dress designs, a client can look for a pagne jumpsuit (pagne is the printed cotton fabric widely worn across West and Central Africa), a man can look for suit ideas. Someone furnishing an apartment can scroll through living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens or house facades.

Pinterest fits this pattern particularly well. The platform describes itself as a visual discovery space where users search for, save and organize ideas for future projects. The model people once hunted for in a magazine or on a wall now sits in an almost bottomless gallery.

« You find a huge number of images for anything you need. From clothing to hairstyles, through looks, home design and so on. It really makes everyday life easy, » says Naelle Fongang, a regular user of the platform.

Clients hold out their phones 📲

In hair salons, the shift is especially visible. A client can now walk in with a screenshot, show the style she wants and ask the stylist to reproduce or adapt it.

« Before, clients mostly looked at the styles we had on display. Now, many come in with a photo already on their phone, » says Sandrine Meye, a hairdresser.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the photos on salon walls have vanished. They still help clients who don’t know exactly what they want. The difference is that the choice no longer has to start with the professional. It starts on the phone.

At the tailor’s, the app walks in too 🧵

For tailors, the photo has become an almost unavoidable reference. A client might show a dress found online, ask for the same cut or simply want inspiration. The tailor then has to study the model, understand the request and sometimes explain what can be reproduced with the fabric at hand.

« Clients often come with photos. Sometimes they want exactly that model, sometimes they only want the cut and a different fabric, » explains Derrick Allan, a tailor.

This also changes the relationship between client and professional. Before, tailors had more room to suggest their own designs. Today, clients sometimes arrive with a very precise idea already in mind. The smartphone becomes the first tool for preparing an order.

The phenomenon goes well beyond hairdressing and tailoring. Someone decorating a living room can look for furniture ideas; another can look for a child’s bedroom. Someone building a house can search for facade or layout designs. Pinterest lets users save what they find in boards to come back to later, and offers visual search that starts from an image to surface similar styles or objects.

Can every model found online actually be made ? 🧵

That’s where professionals have a say. A photo found online might show a hairstyle done on a different hair texture. A dress may have been made from another fabric. A decor shot may have been taken in a much bigger house. A kitchen can look perfect on screen and still be hard to reproduce in a smaller space.

A digital model gives a direction, not a guarantee. Hence the before-and-after comparisons that regularly circulate online, pitting the model a client asked for against the result. To avoid nasty surprises, the question is worth putting to tailors, hairstylists, decorators and architects: do the models found online always match what their clients expect?

« Every day you see the ‘this is what I wanted, this is what I got’ challenge online. I don’t know whether the professionals in those fields are incompetent or whether the models were made differently, but something is off, » says Sandrine Alima, a student.

The wall didn’t disappear, it moved into the phone 🖼️

Yesterday, a client might spend several minutes in front of the photos on a salon wall to pick her next hairstyle. Today, she can scroll her phone before she even walks through the door. The catalog hasn’t really disappeared. It has changed shape.

It went from the wall to the magazine, from the magazine to the computer, then to the smartphone. Behind that evolution sits a habit that has barely changed: seeing something you like before asking someone to make it real.

At bottom, Pinterest didn’t invent the need to look for models. It digitized a habit that already existed. The most striking change isn’t that models went digital, but that the wall that once held a few of them now fits in our pockets.

Your turn !
Before Pinterest and smartphones, where did you find the hairstyles, outfits or decor that inspired you? Tell us in the comments 🤔