Braids are nothing new to Black ladies, however just lately essentially the most fashionable Black ladies I do know are carrying a specific model of cornrows in contrast to something I’ve ever seen. These freestyle braids take the form of mesmerizing twirls, swirls, and symbols that emulate hieroglyphic script hiding a celestial message. Not like conventional cornrows that run straight again, freestyle braids observe patterns impressed by visuals like adornments on welded iron gates, stars, and Adinkra symbols (a pictorial language originating in West Africa). The model isn’t solely taking off in my group chat: #Freestylebraids has over 83 million views on TikTok with movies of stylists internationally turning blown-out or curly Black hair into geometric artworks. Freestyle braids had been even showcased on the current Aveda Congress, the place prime hairstylists from world wide met to have a good time the 12 months’s largest hair tendencies.

Like many tendencies, it’s laborious to pinpoint precisely when or from the place this model originated. Black ladies have been braiding their hair in cornrows for hundreds of years and, to my Nigerian-American eye, the freestyle braids are paying homage to pre-colonial coiffures featured in anthropology books. “There’s a relentless trade between the African continent and its diaspora which may be explored by hair,” says Marie Celine Agossa who created the Instagram web page Yua Hair, as a curated temper board of African hairstyles all through historical past. As Attract beforehand reported, on the Aveda Congress, the model’s world creative director of texture, Renée Gadar, confirmed a set of braids “as a tribute to centuries of tales handed down from technology to technology.” This included a freestyle look that featured greater than 2,000 golden beads gildings, floor-length braids organized in a “roadmap,” and swooped cornrows to represent the waves that carried ships of individuals stolen from their houses. Standard African musicians — together with Rema, Tyla, Amarae, and Ayra Starr — have been carrying iterations of freestyle braids like these, solely furthering the development’s explosion.