Interview #1
Interview Subject: Nina Lourie
Object in Question: Hair Spirals

Welcome to the first interview of The 500 Hammers Project, a weekly interview and creation process designed to highlight how useful, specific objects and tools can influence and improve our daily lives.

Our first interview subject, Nina Lourie, is a 20-something woman from New York who’s just started a new job at the Macmillan publishing company. She likes Irish dance music, hard cider, sexy musicians, fiddling with her napkins, ponies, kittens and lots of fabric in her clothing. (She didn’t tell me all of those things in our interview; I’ve known her over 5 years now.)

Nina works just down the road from me, so when I offered to interview her as our first subject for The 500 Hammers Project, we made plans for lunch. When it came time to meet up, however, at the bottom of Madison Square Park, I turned in circles for 10 minutes before giving up and calling her.

“Where ARE you?” I asked. A girl in a blue button down, a short grey skirt and a tight bun stood up from a bench not 20 feet from where I was standing, and as I caught her eye I laughed. I was looking for her hair. With it up in a bun and my tunnel vision, she blended right into the scenery.

Nina’s hair, as seen in her lovely photo, above, is the kind of brilliant red that makes your eyes burn if you see it in the sunlight. In her own words, when I asked about it over our Cuban food, “It’s all the way down my back at this point, maybe all the way to my bum.” (She’s English, by the way.)

For our first project, Clockstone Studios has offered to make Nina a pair of hair spirals, mostly because she’s dropped about a dozen hints so far as to how much she OMGWANTS them. But when I sat down and started to plan her interview, I had utterly no idea how to explain what a hair spiral is. So I asked her:

They’re spirals that hold up your hair by twisting into it instead of clasping it. They don’t do that clasping thingy where your hair is pulled by a single point of tension. Hard to describe, but they’re an easy way to create a nice, neat, classier look. You’ll edit this to make me sound more intelligent, right?

Okay, that’s a bit unfair. But hair spirals are a hard concept to master in words. Two pieces of heavy wire are twisted into shallow, cone-shaped spirals. The ends are finished, and the two pieces are twisted together through an uplifted bun to lock together, consequently holding one’s hair in place. Don’t worry; we’ll post pictures.

When I asked Nina about being a part of this project, she let me know that now was actually the perfect time for her; she’s just started a new job and is facing the challenge of wrangling her typical style of dress into something that works for her new office:

I need to find a way to take what I have now and keep that interesting, artistic look but still have a great deal of professionalism. The challenge is with fuck-off long hair, what do I do with it every day? I don’t like putting it up in a low bun that does nothing for me…the temptation is to leave it down, and I feel very much like something out of a fantasy print with all of my long locks flowing around me – but that just doesn’t work.

You’ve talked about how you’re now needed to adapt your style. Where did that style come from originally?

Hmm…probably it started because I spend so much time around theatre people, and because I spent so many years as a costumer, so I’m very influenced by that artsy style. I like nontraditional cuffs, bell sleeves, big flowing skirts…

And how’s that working for you now that you’re in an office?

It’s an interesting transition! My office isn’t all suits, but I do need to appear more grown up. I’m much, much younger than the people I work with.

Anything else?

My styles very influenced by my friends – that’s why I want the hair spirals, because [our friend] Gina has something very like them. I see things on a rack that I would never touch, but then one of my friends wears it and all of a sudden I’m thinking “Oh say, that’s actually really interesting – stunning, even.”

Our food came in the middle of the conversation, and I discovered that Nina had bent the straw for my lemonade into a full circle. “I can’t help it!” she laughed, “I have to fiddle!” And that’s true; one of my strongest images of Nina is from a few summers ago, when I found her sitting on a couch twirling one long lock of hair around her finger over and over and over again.

Last question: So what’s your new job, then?

Ha! Good question. Well, I work for Macmillan, but they’re not exactly sure of who I am yet. My title’s basically “Digital Piracy Associate.” Most of my work is to try and reinvent MacMillan’s policy on e-books so that they can continue to be profitable.

Thanks again, Nina! Come Sunday, we’ll post pretty pretty pictures of your new hair spirals. Hopefully they will put the question of what-exactly-these-things-are to rest.

Also we will include ponies.