A pioneering force in Afro, mixed and curly hair culture, stylist Charlotte Mensah has a London exhibition

For most people, a retrospective of their life’s work is the ultimate occasion to celebrate themselves, but for Charlotte Mensah, her new exhibition, ‘Charlotte Mensah: Community Matters’, is, as its title suggests, as much about the people who helped her become a pioneering force in Afro, mixed, and curly hair culture as it is about how she got there.

Open in London’s Ladbroke Hall 8-13 September 2026, ‘Community Matters’ is a mixed-media exhibition that traces Mensah’s life and career, from her childhood in Ghana to the opening of her famous salon, Hairlounge, on Portobello Road, and her position as one of Britain’s most influential hairstylists. In doing so, it showcases the people who inspired Mensah along the way and highlights the larger conversations around culture, creativity, and belonging that have always informed Mensah’s practice.

According to Mensah, the ambition was never simply to take things from the salon and put them into Ladbroke Hall. ‘We wanted to translate something of the feeling of the salon into an exhibition context: the intimacy, the conversation, the photography, the objects and, most importantly, the people,’ she says. ‘To do that, we had to look at my whole life and understand how it had informed my practice.’

Working with friends and Hairlounge customers, senior curator at V&A East Madeleine Haddon, and interior designer Jacqueline Douglas, Mensah filled the space with images and artifacts, creating an immersive space that will also, for the duration it is open, play host to talks and workshops like ‘Beauty, Business & Belonging’ and ‘The Modern-Day Salon: A Cultural Institution.’

Seeing her life presented before her in this way was an illuminating experience for Mensah. ‘It confirmed something I have always felt: none of this happened overnight, and none of it happened alone. My practice has always been social and relational. The work is hair, but around the hair there has always been family, friendship, conversation and collaboration.’

That was especially true when it came to Mensah’s family: ‘What surprised me was how present my children were at so many important points in the story,’ she says. ‘My son’s bedroom became my first salon in the mid-1990s. Then, while we were going through the archive, I found a photograph of my daughter in 2002 hiding inside the counter that was being made for the salon. That same counter is still there on Portobello Road today. The salon itself was designed by my neighbour, the architect Robert Grace. So even when I look at the physical space, I can see relationships embedded within it.’

Importantly, the exhibition also highlights Mensah’s trailblazing role in the history of afro and textured hair, and how that history has changed over the past 40 years. Mensah says he has seen the visibility of Afro hair change ‘enormously’ but, ‘visibility is only one part of progress’.

‘The conversation I want us to have much more seriously now is about education. There is an art to hairstyling, of course, but underneath the artistry, there has to be knowledge. You have to understand the fundamentals before you can improvise. You crawl, then you walk, then eventually you can run.

‘That is why I believe we need clearer standards and qualifications that properly demonstrate a stylist’s skill set, and that should apply across hairdressing. It is also why education has become such an important part of my own practice.’ To that end, Mensah runs Curl Workshops for families and delivers professional masterclasses for salons because, as she says, ‘ultimately, my idea of inclusion is very simple: somebody with Afro, curly or textured hair should be able to walk into a salon anywhere in this country and know that their hair can be cared for properly.’

'Charlotte Mensah: Community Matters' is on view at Ladbroke Hall until 13 September 2026