The Magic Maker.(Julien D'Y's practice as a hairdresser)

Byline: Photographed by Annie Leibovitz

A rebel, a romantic, a pirate, a painternot to mention a trusted collaborator of fashion's top designers. Sarah Mower meets the marvelous and mysterious couturier of hair.

Who is Julien D'Ys? There's a simple answer: D'Ys (pronounced dees ) is one of the most revered hair masters working todaya raggle-taggle French itinerant who roams fashion fixing a myriad of indelible images with his scissors, bobby pins, wigs, powders, paints, and potions. It is he who put heads into three-foot clouds for Comme des GarAs.ons for spring, and he who works the hair of John Galliano's girls till they start to look and behave like bobbed flappers, marcel-waved Pigalle streetwalkers, or befrizzed absinthe drinkers. He does rampantly huge hair, narrative hair, abstract hair that magnifies a mood; massive puffs of color, piled-up coils and curls, shapes molded and sculpted to the cranium. Yetin total contrasthe also does stealthy chic: uncomplicated, soft hair that looks as though a girl has simply raked her hands through it; this season's lush chignons, subtly streaked with emerald, burgundy, and midnight-blue, for Stefano Pilati at YSL; the modernist black head wraps (note: no hair at all) for Dries Van Noten.

Usually, where clothes are rememberedin photographs, on runwayshair fades to irrelevance, but with D'Ys, the head action is inseparable from the impact of a great collection. Try to imagine last winter's Saint Laurent show without the black bowl-cut automaton wigs. Impossible.

Yet for all this influence, who is Julien D'Ys, really? He's never put his name to products, never become (as others have since film, video, and digital reporting went backstage) a nonstop, tip-a-minute quote machine. There's a strange sense that this is a person who has been hiding himself in plain view for more than 25 years, delivering astonishing work denoted only by that enigmatic byline. Or, sometimes, nothing at all. Keep digging, and it transpires that this is the man who, one day in the late eighties, snipped Linda Evangelista's long, nondescript brown hair to her nape and pushed it forward over her eyesthe cut that arguably made the big bang that set off the entire era of the supermodel. But who knew?

Among hairdressers, this mysteriousness has earned him something approaching the aura of an indie-rock god, as I learned from the mouth of the young British stylist who cuts my hair. "No!" he gasped when I told him I was on the way to Paris to interview D'Ys. "Tell him I'd do anything to assist him. Tell him I'd carry his bag!" he begged. " Anything. I've tried to study him for ages but have always come to a dead end."

All of this was running through my mind as I crossed the cobbled courtyard to the D'Ys studio on the rue de Braque in Paris, doing my best to quell a flashback to a John Galliano incident several years ago. Backstage, I'd made the mistake of flipping open an incredible sketchbook bulging with pen-and-ink drawings, writing, BrassaA[macron] photographs, and Polaroids that was lying on a table amid the show debris. No sooner was I turning the pages, spellbound, than an irate assistant ran over, slammed the book shut, and snatched it away with the kind of filthy look only a Parisienne can achieve. Unwittingly, I'd invaded the privacy of one of Julien D'Ys's diariesthe visual, intensely personal records of work and inspiration he keeps. But how was I to know? After fifteen years of reporting from the shows, I still hadn't a clue what he looked like.