Having just returned to New York after seven days of back-to-back work travel, the hairstylist Nikki Nelms is reclining on a gold-accented white sofa in her Brooklyn apartment, catching up on an episode of Black Ink Crew Chicago. A star of the VH1 reality show is gesticulating wildly on the television, but her hair isn’t budging. “It’s too pretty. Plastic,” Nelms says, her asymmetrical curls drifting out of a silk navy head scarf that is fastened on the top of her head. “I would add breakage, flyaways, airiness,” she continues, detailing an approach to weaves and extensions predicated on instinct and a talent for making hair “junky,” which is how Nelms refers to the hard-won natural texture that has become her signature.
On the coffee table, a sheet of paper sticks out of Eli Reed’s photography book Black in America—a thank-you note from Solange Knowles and her husband, the video director Alan Ferguson, for Nelms’s work on the visuals for A Seat at the Table, the R&B star’s third studio album. Since the record’s debut at number one on the Billboard 200 chart in October, hundreds of fans have posted self-portraits replicating the now-iconic shoulder-length braids Nelms stacked with beads and shells sourced from craft stores and thrift shops in the video for the single “Don’t Touch My Hair.” Nelms opens a plastic bag full of pliable, braided loops, which the singer and her backup dancers also wear in the rhythmic manifesto about the sacredness of individuality for black women that currently boasts almost ten million views on YouTube, and has helped Knowles—and her hairstylist—go viral. Plumping the accessories back to life, Nelms explains that she had shaped the individual plaits over pipe cleaners. “Half my kit comes from Home Depot,” she says, laughing.
The typed note mentions “Shareefa bangs,” the slanted fringe worn by singer Shareefa Faradah Cooper that Nelms reinterpreted on Knowles the night they met some ten years ago. The style cleverly concealed an eye infection, a quick-thinking dose of subterfuge and compassion that made the women fast friends. They’ve been working together ever since.
“Nikki is like family. She understands and elevates my aesthetic,” says Zoë Kravitz, who relies on Nelms for everything from Met-gala prep to maintaining her newly platinum mid back–grazing braids, which she touches up at Nelms’s home, where blackboards with notes about upcoming shoots hang on the walls. Down the hall from the kitchen, there is a small back-room studio that allows Nelms to foster a sense of intimacy with her regulars—and readily prepare mixed drinks and peach cobbler when La La Anthony comes over for an appointment and just “to hang out.”
In her 30s, Nelms is petite and round-faced with warm eyes and a charismatic smile. Mostly self-taught, she honed her skills as a teenager growing up in St. Petersburg, Florida, where her early customers were school friends (an entrepreneurially minded Nelms skipped her senior prom to do hard-gelled looks for her classmates at $20 a head) and her family, which includes eight aunts “with eight different hair textures and eight different attitudes.” Her first big break after eventually enrolling in beauty school came when she met the rapper Lil Wayne, né Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., at Club 360 in New Orleans in 2004. “I just went up to him, asked him about his mom, and asked when he was shooting his next music video,” she recalls in a gentle Southern accent. That same refreshing congeniality—and a knack for mixing avant-garde ideas with more traditional techniques—has made Nelms a valuable asset to clients including Serena Williams and Beyoncé, who are looking not just for a service provider but for a collaborator.
This particular brand of collaboration requires “tact, negotiation, seduction, and education,” explains Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning literary critic and the author of Negroland, a memoir that meditates extensively on the collective beauty practices of black women. Jefferson sees Nelms’s work as a signal of “the evolving economy” of black beauty. “I lived through the Afro period [in the 1970s]. Now it’s like the artist Lorna Simpson’s Wigs. Straightened one day, then Afro, then perm,” she says, referencing Simpson’s 1994 lithographic portfolio, which shows canonical black hairstyles isolated from bodies. Adds Jefferson, “Nikki’s way of doing hair is not signaling a message of gentility or propriety or radicalism.” It’s pure aesthetics. There is no presumption of conforming to the social demands of “belonging” to blackness, which allows her work to resonate broadly. After she gave Kravitz a simple, deconstructed ballerina bun for the November premiere of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Nelms woke up to a flurry of direct messages inquiring about how-to instructions.
Still, ideological empathy is essential to the way Nelms works with Knowles, whose songs convey unambiguous messages of black pride. “It’s about trust,” she says, referring to her ability to process the singer’s precise vision—say, a reference to a canvas by the British figurative painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye—into the Harlem Renaissance–era finger waves that follow the opening look in the “Don’t Touch My Hair” video. The glossy ridges make for a powerful contrast, but Nelms is more interested in talking execution than plot turns. During the shoot in New Orleans, it started to rain on set, a potential death knell for the production and the popular twenties style. But in her kit, next to pants hangers to straighten extensions, Downy sheets to tame static, and a tub of the beauty-shop staple Ampro Pro Styl black gel, Nelms unearthed a handful of simple metal clips that she used to anchor each precisely formed peak against the elements. Utilitarian in nature, the deftly placed accessories read as a considered silver-tipped detail, and ultimately stayed in between takes. “I’m not a hair activist,” she insists. “I’m here for beauty.”
Fashion Editor: Jorden Bickham
Hair: Nikki Nelms; Makeup: Miguel Ramos