In a lofty workplace within the Bedford-Stuyvesant part of Brooklyn, Shani Lechan provides her shoppers the hair of their desires. It often takes solely a few weeks.
In a single room she gives preliminary consultations, taking their measurements and studying about their preferences. A number of months later, they’ll go to a second room, the place Ms. Lechan will makes positive every thing is the proper match.
The Shani Wigs workplace is painted cream with a concretelike end, the molding is elegant, the home windows are floor-to-ceiling and there’s a marble hearth within the ready room. Not far-off, a tufted pink area cloud of a settee supplies a spot for guests to sit down as they await an viewers with the wig maker.
On this minimalist, Kardashianesque area, Ms. Lechan, 31, greets prospects from all over the world: Los Angeles, Florida, India, Turkey, South Williamsburg. Some are Orthodox Jewish ladies; others are most cancers sufferers; at the least one is a global supermodel (that may be Naomi Campbell). All the ladies come for a similar factor: an undetectable, luxurious human hair wig. The worth tag can vary from $5,000 to $18,000.
Wigs are in all places. To the untrained eye, they won’t appear to be as widespread as they had been within the Sixties or ’70s, once they had been worn by the likes of Barbra Streisand, Cher and Diana Ross. However right now, many wigs and toppers go undetected on pink carpets, at galas, in films and on journal covers — offered, after all, that they’re ok.
Ms. Lechan’s objective is identical with each wig: to make a customized creation indistinguishable from her consumer’s pure hair. It doesn’t matter whether or not that consumer is Ms. Campbell, who discovered herself in Ms. Lechan’s session chair final yr requesting 30-plus inches of lengthy, straight, pure black hair for a Vogue cowl shoot, or an Orthodox lady selecting to cowl her pure hair to stick to spiritual customs, as Ms. Lechan herself does.
“I used to be launched to wigs at a really younger age,” stated Ms. Lechan, who was born to Orthodox Jewish dad and mom in Paris, the place she grew up on the Proper Financial institution. “My mother wore wigs, folks round me wore wigs, so it was nothing loopy for me.”
About 10 years in the past, she went to a wig retailer to strive on wigs with a pal. They didn’t appear interesting to her. Ms. Lechan knew that she would finally be married and must put on a wig. When that point got here, she stated, she didn’t need it to look dangerous.
“I believed, If that is going to occur to me, I don’t need to seem like that,” Ms. Lechan stated. “I needed to discover ways to make wigs.”
Whereas finding out enterprise administration at Reichman College in Israel, she signed up for a wig-making class on the facet. Ms. Lechan started to earn pocket cash by making and styling wigs for her associates, utilizing a stitching machine that belonged to her father, a garment maker, to stitch tracks of hair onto wig caps.
“I checked out my finest pal, who was married on the time, and I’m like, ‘I’m going to make you a wig, your wig is just not good,’” Ms. Lechan stated. “Then my mother needed a wig, after which her pal needed a wig, and this entire factor began. As quickly as I used to be in it, I had the imaginative and prescient and the ambition to actually make it a enterprise.”
In 2016, after she was married at 23, she moved from Paris to Brooklyn. She started to pursue her dream by going door to door within the Orthodox neighborhood providing her wig companies. Typically, she traveled an hour’s drive exterior Brooklyn to Jewish communities in Lakewood, N.J. She labored nonstop for years doing wig repairs and chopping and styling wigs. She saved her cash — her husband, Dov Narboni, advises her on investing and helped her safe loans — and in 2019, she opened her first storefront location within the Crown Heights part of Brooklyn.
“After I make a wig and the wig comes out stunning and the consumer is completely happy, this makes my day — like, that’s it,” Ms. Lechan stated, her darkish eyes widening. “It’s an actual transformation and hair may be very highly effective.”
It’s an evolution in wigs that Rachel Licht, 35, is completely happy to have discovered. An Orthodox Jew, Ms. Licht started sporting wigs when she was married at 19.
“It’s not simple — you don’t really feel like your self,” Ms. Licht, who owns a catering enterprise in Westchester County, N.Y., stated in a cellphone interview. “Despite the fact that, , there are wigs that type of seem like your hair and do an excellent job and no matter. I’ve all the time achieved it, however it’s been laborious. It’s been a problem.”
Now a mom to 4 boys, Ms. Licht was determined to really feel comfy in her wig.
“I actually, actually needed to really feel like myself,” Ms. Licht stated. She appears to have discovered what she was searching for in Ms. Lechan’s wigs. “That is subsequent degree,” she stated. “That is particular. That is distinctive. That is completely different.”
When crafting her wigs, Ms. Lechan imitates the location of pure child hairs — the wispy hairs usually discovered on the hairline. Throughout wig pickup, she locations the wig on the consumer’s head and begins to put or pluck hairs on the entrance of the wig with tweezers or a needle. She then cuts the lace across the brow of the wig to match the consumer’s pure hairline. A part of the magic of the unit is in its customization, one thing laborious to search out in a store-bought, one-size-fits-all wig.
Ms. Licht flew throughout the nation not too long ago with two of her younger sons and she or he wore her wig for the whole thing of her almost seven-hour flight, she stated.
“I didn’t even rip it off proper once I received house,” Ms. Licht stated with amusing.
It’s that consolation that has Owen Gould, a star hair stylist who works with Kirsten Dunst, Julianne Moore and the mannequin Barbara Palvin, repeatedly working with Ms. Lechan. Mr. Gould discovered Ms. Lechan’s work on Instagram and reached out.
“I by no means have to fret about it wanting wiggy,” Mr. Gould stated on a cellphone name from Los Angeles. “The working theme is that everybody who I put them on is like, ‘Wow, it kind of doesn’t seem like a wig.’”
That element is the work of a three-woman crew. In a room on the other facet of the session space, they sit at tables with stitching machines, rigorously stitching tracks onto wig caps. Ms. Lechan hopes so as to add a fourth worker earlier than the top of the yr, she stated.
On Instagram, Ms. Lechan posts a collection of movies wherein she tries to decipher which celebrities are sporting wigs at pink carpets or film premieres. She thinks it’s essential to shatter the stigma that many ladies who put on wigs really feel. Whether or not for spiritual causes or medical causes or just to really feel fabulous, wigs are private.
“Should you’re an individual that’s sporting a wig and also you don’t have a alternative however to put on a wig, however celebrities are doing it too and so they’re pleased with it, that’s wonderful,” Ms. Lechan stated. “That provides such a distinct message.”
“You’re feeling such as you’re as stunning as them,” she added.