high-maintenance hair; Bid adieu to wash-and-wear.

During the thirties and forties, when Hollywood wanted to transform its latest ingenue into a bona fide star, there was one man for the job: George Hurrell. The legendary lensman lit legends like Harlow, Garbo, and Hayworth from above, bathing their upturned faces in halos of diffused light and transforming them into the surreally perfect, alabaster icons that women idolized and men worshiped. The look was pure, unadulterated glamour: sweeping lame gowns, expanses of creamy skin, precision-painted lips, and that hair-the gleaming ripples swept up in carefully crafted twists or swooping loose and thick over one shoulder. It's the type of flawless, never-a-strand-astray style that backstage-hair honcho Luigi Murenu has come to identify-this season-as "George Hurrell hair."

Indeed, the refined femininity that rules this fall's fashion calls for hair that's equally planned and thought-out-hair that, while not exactly retro, evokes an age in which "wash and wear" and "bed head" were considered beyond the pale. Witness Karen Elson clicking down the catwalk at Bill Blass with a tumble of glossy, groomed russet curls. Marc Jacobs's subtly sexy secretaries matched their tweedy pencil skirts and flouncy, bow-necked blouses with smooth, well-mannered waves that bounced just beneath their shoulders, while Louis Vuitton's highland lasses went for full-throttle beauty, with bloodred lips, flushed cheeks, and girlish, smoothed-out corkscrews. "It's fantasy hair," crows Murenu, who engineered similarly gorgeous, rolling waves to complete Natalia Vodianova's silver-screen style (previous page) and Gisele's Victor/Victoria turn in this month's issue (see "About a Boy," page 696). "So rich, so well crafted. Totally done. Women loooove it," he says.

Revered stylist Garren explains hair's role in the season's strict mandate of head-to-toe polish: "There are three elements to looking finished and truly well dressed: the right accessories, the ...