Name: Why This Art Is In Every Hair Salon
Uploaded: 2026-01-18T17:41:58.000Z
Duration: 5 min 59 s
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Most likely you've seen them at your local hair or nail salon, faded by time and years of sun damage.

These are the Nagle women, paintings made by American artist Patrick Nagel that became icons in and of the 1980s.

Nagel women usually have sleek black hair, paper white skin, bold red lipstick, and

a look of mystery, power and cool detachment.

Their angular faces are captured with black outlines and minimal detail in a graphic style that resembles digital vector art.

Before that was even possible, all these images were made by hand.

A Vietnam vet, Nagle began his career as a freelance illustrator for companies and magazines.

But his break came when he landed a job with plain Playboy in 1975.

Nagel refined his trademark style and was exposed to a wider audience than he had been previously.

Then in 1977, he hooked up with Carl Bornstein, who just launched a publishing company called Mirage Editions to champion the often neglected genre of poster art.

Borenstein had been in Europe admiring the work of Toulouse Lautrec and Pierre Bernard, Parisian poster artists of the late 19th century, and

came back to America looking for an artist of his own time when Nagel walked into his life.

Nagel created several original works which were then made into a limited number of serigraphs or screen printed copies and sold.

The most popular of these were the Nagel women, and

they quickly got the attention of the art world.

Meanwhile, the manager of the English New Wave band Duran Duran saw Naegle's work in Playboy and commissioned a picture for the COVID of their 1982 album Robin Rio, which became a smash hit in both the UK and then the US Bringing his art into the homes of millions around the world.

Duran Duran is the quintessential 80s band, Rio, the quintessential 80s album.

And that helped to cement the Nagel woman as an emblem of the decade.

As Elena Milley writes, this woman is sophisticated and self confident, a professional who is not afraid to be glamorous.

Like Warhol and Lichtenstein before him, Naegle bridged the gap between art and commerce, highbrow and low brow.

Like Lautrec and Bernard, he elevated the popular medium of posters while retaining their accessibility, their immediacy.

Day by day, little by little, Nagel removed details until he arrived at the fewest number of lines that would still capture the spirit of his models.

This technique, paired with his eye for graphic design, makes his work so engaging.

It's also, I think, why Nagel women, or crude imitations of them adorn the walls and windows so many salons.

In his absolutely essential book understanding comics, Scott McCloud explains why cartoons have the power to involve us so deeply.

You see, the farther you move along the spectrum of abstraction from photo to simple smiley face, the more people an image describes.

A photo can only really be one person, but two dots and a line?

We spend our lives looking at other faces, but

aside from pictures and mirrors, we rarely see our own.

Our mental image of ourselves isn't photo real.

McLeod believes that this explains our fascination with cartoons.

When we see one, we fill in its blanks with ourselves.

Nagel's women, and men for that matter, are the perfect combination of abstract and specific.

They're cartoons that don't look cartoony or goofy.

They give the impression of real people, chic, fashionable, independent people, but

still leave enough space for you to place yourself in them.

For salons, Nagel women served as aspirational images, though it has to be said that these women all being of one complexion, it's likely they were only aspirational for a certain segment of the population.

This speaks to the warped priorities of 1980s advertising and the 80s in general.

Unfortunately for Nagel, he only got to enjoy a few years of success.

Dying suddenly of a heart attack in 1984, age 39, he never became a household name, despite his work finding its way into so many households.

Four decades later, his icons still peer out the windows of hair and nail salons aplenty, faded ambassadors of cool for a bygone era.

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Why This Art Is In Every Hair Salon

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