“We’re just playing dress-up,” Evanie Frausto tells me at his salon in Brooklyn. He’s pinning an electric cobalt wig to a mannequin head, prepping it for a model who will arrive shortly at his studio. It’s the day after Halloween — a time when most people are putting their costumes back into storage — but for the celebrity hairstylist, fantasy is always in season.
The day before, Frausto pulled a “double shift”: styling Rosalía in the morning, then heading to Madison Square Garden to get Sabrina Carpenter stage-ready for her Short n’ Sweet show. Asking if he ever gets tired is pointless (“I love to work”), but asking him to brag about his stacked roster of It girls is even more of a dead end. He prefers to slip his clients into conversation like old friends, and that’s because most of them are. Still, you might miss the name-drop if you’re not paying close attention — Bella (Hadid), Alexa (Demie), Addison (Rae), Sabrina (Carpenter) among them. Collectively, they represent a decade of hair trends — the slick Y2K gloss, the sculpted baby braids, the soft-grunge layers that went from club kid to couture. The only people who seem to still surprise him? Lady Gaga and Nicole Kidman (always referred to by their full names, his tell that, at times, even he’s still soaking it all in).
“If I’m known for being the It girl hairstylist, I’ll take it,” Frausto tells me at one point. A rising star whose world feels both carefully constructed and completely his own, he doesn’t mind getting straight to the point about exactly who he is and how he got here: a strong belief in fate and a healthy dose of whimsy, and his meticulously designed salon, fitted with vintage Playboys and a hot pink floor, is a physical manifestation of both. He’s 33 (“but who f*cking cares?”), a February Aquarius (“I get so bored”), and was raised on the internet (his MySpace song was “Hands Down” by Dashboard Confessional).
He styled his first cover shoot in 2017 — Chloë Sevigny for Vogue Ukraine by Nan Goldin — but over the past year or so, Frausto’s stock has skyrocketed as a resident hairstylist to the stars: Sabrina Carpenter for Rolling Stone and Interview Magazine, Kim Kardashian for Re-Edition, Margaret Qualley for Cosmopolitan and i-D, Nicole Kidman for Allure, Rosalía for Elle among them. Needless to say, his salon library has nearly run out of shelf space — and that’s not counting everything else he’s worked on, like the Katseye x Gap campaign or Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” hair. A good rule of thumb? If it’s gone viral in the past 12 months, it was probably Frausto.
“It’s literally so emo, but I was like, ‘You don’t get me.’”
Born in Orange County to Mexican immigrant parents, Frausto says he’s been “chasing pink from an early age.” He’d steal his sister’s Barbies, cut their hair, and color it with marker. “I had my spots where I would stash them, like underneath the bathroom sink — either to play with or because I gave her a f*ck-ass purple bob, and I was like, ‘I can’t look at her anymore.’”
As a teenager, Frausto moved on to styling and coloring his friends’ hair as well as his own. (Think full scene kid: choppy side bangs, layers, and Manic Panic.) He compares that time in his life to Thirteen, the 2003 cult film about teenage rebellion in Los Angeles, because Venice Beach was the epicenter of all things rebellious for him. In fact, it’s where he got his first tattoo — a bright red kiss mark inked inside a tent on the strip. “Now, full circle, I’m working with Sabrina on her Short n’ Sweet era, and a big motif is the kiss mark,” he says. “It’s kind of the universe being like, ‘That’s what the kiss mark was for.’”
That same summer, Frausto got his first fake ID “from someone who kind of looked like me, but not really.” He convinced a friend to sell it to him so he could get tattooed and go to clubs in Hollywood, where he happened to meet an It girl at the beginning of her indie sleaze impact: Sky Ferreira. “We were the only ones who were like 13. She had this really big curly hair,” he remembers. “But she wasn’t a pop star then. We would just hang out and party.” It was a foreshadowing of the chance encounters that would come to define his career — like meeting Bella Hadid as an assistant on set or getting his first professional hair gig via a drag queen friend he met at a club.
“I guess that’s when I realized I was a little major — if the kids are commuting that far.”
In hindsight, Frausto says the real reason he wanted to grow up so fast was a desperate desire to control his own destiny and a general feeling that that wouldn’t be found in his hometown. “I just knew I was different and I was so over being compliant,” he tells me. “It’s literally so emo, but I was like, ‘You don’t get me.’”
At 18, after his cosmetology class took a celebratory graduation trip from California to the city, he decided not to leave with them. “I didn’t even mean to move to New York,” Frausto says, laughing. He crashed at a hostel, broke but hopeful, taking things one haircut and one hookup at a time. “I was secretly seeking shelter on Grindr,” he says. “One night, I wasn’t successful, so I came back to the hostel, opened the door, turned on my flashlight, and there were eight bunk beds and 16 people.”
Going out to parties, Frausto met a hairstylist who needed an assistant and roommate, and he promptly moved out of the hostel to Jersey City. During this “era,” as he calls it, he went on to assist industry heavyweights like Jimmy Paul, Laurent Philippon, and Guido Palau. “You essentially let your life become someone else’s life,” he says. “It’s like dating — you fight, you bicker, you make up. But you learn everything.”
Now, two of his own assistants — Marin from Philly and Austin from New Jersey — have followed in his footsteps, moving to New York to work under him. “I guess that’s when I realized I was a little major,” he says, “if the kids are commuting that far.”
Shortly after, he also realized that he was “major” enough to need his own salon — if only because he had loose hair blowing through his apartment like “tumbleweeds.” About three years ago, he stumbled on an abandoned space in Brooklyn. “The floor was rotted,” he laughs. “It was like a rat graveyard.” Flash forward to today, and it’s become his editorial playground. He credits Bella Hadid with giving his career its real jumpstart in 2019: “She was the first one to take me under her wing and say, ‘Come do my hair, come meet all these people.’”
These days, Frausto lives close to his studio, surrounded by townhomes that face Prospect Park, and doesn’t go clubbing nearly as much. On his days off, he gets a smoothie from the mom-and-pop shop on the corner where the cashier gives you whatever she feels like making and “vegs out” by coming into the studio, where he’s working on a photo book that reads like a time capsule of New York’s underground. He spends his days teasing Sabrina Carpenter’s hair — and to the question of whether she wears a wig, his answer is, “I love the mystery.”
“It’s like dating — you fight, you bicker, you make up. But you learn everything.”
As we wrap up, Frausto places the blue wig, styled with bombshell curls, on his model. Despite it being early on a Saturday morning, his Barbie Dreamhouse salon is already filling with photographers, stylists, and makeup artists. It’s not hard to see why: His studio represents the things he loved as a kid — dolls, music, rebellion, color — made meaningful as an adult. “Playing dress-up” isn’t just an aesthetic Frausto’s built a career on — small acts of reinvention are a throughline in his life.
“I feel like later in life, I’m going to look back, being like, ‘Oh, wait. I did that,’” he tells me. But for now, there’s no time for reflection. He has another wig to work on.
