“When people sit in my chair, we have a full assessment of how much they’re willing to do to their hair every day,” said the hair stylist Lauren Sottile, standing in her sunny studio in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn on a recent November morning. “What vibe do they want to emulate? Masc? Femme? Edgy Bushwick girl? First lady?”
Getting to the bottom of those questions requires a connection, she said. The studio is designed as a conduit for that necessary closeness, no matter how briefly she has known a client.
When Rama Duwaji, the wife of then-mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, plopped into her chair last year, the two women had crossed paths only briefly, on a camping trip upstate the previous summer. Duwaji came with reference photos for a more layered style than the bob she was already wearing.
She wanted a “bixie-esque thing,” Sottile said, referring to the mix between a bob and a pixie cut that has become Sottile’s signature. It’s one that many people associate with an artsy sensibility.
That seemed to suit Duwaji, an illustrator and animator, and the cut quickly became known as the Rama. But it also appealed to dozens of other people who (especially after seeing Duwaji on Sottile’s Instagram) have flocked to her studio to get the look, which Sottile achieves with a popular razor-cutting technique.
“I think it is for the woman that is not getting the haircut for the male gaze,” said Kimiko Singer, 29, a freelance photographer who got her first haircut from Sottile in July.
Sottile, 34, became interested in cutting hair during the pandemic, when she was at home trying to D.I.Y. her own cuts. She grew frustrated when her early attempts ended up looking more “femme,” she said.
“I looked like a soccer mom,” she added.
Then she found out about the classes taught by Jayne Matthews, the hair stylist who found a cult following teaching razor cuts in 2020.
Those online tutorials “kind of went viral, and people all over the place obviously couldn’t get haircuts,” Matthews said. “It changed my life.”
Matthews can wax poetic about the razor-cutting method. “I call it carving petals into the hair,” she said. Many stylists approach it as if in a flow state: Videos of the process often have an A.S.M.R. quality.
Once she got down the basics, Sottile was eager to practice on whoever was game. She began cutting hair out of her kitchen in Greenpoint and took her razor with her wherever she went.
But as she got more serious about the practice, she began to outgrow her tiny New York kitchen and found the studio in Greenpoint. Sottile got the keys in July last year and arrived with the root ball of a fiddle leaf fig in a plastic bag.
Now, that fiddle leaf is potted along with a bird of paradise, a gift from friends who had moved to Portugal. It drooped slightly.
“That one did not survive the move,” Sottile said.
Duwaji had been the first client to see the space, she said. The appointment came about after Sottile posted a call for models on her Instagram story last August. (Sottile is still in barber school and has not yet earned her license.) Duwaji, who declined to be interviewed for this article, answered.
Duwaji, then 28, had been wearing an ear-grazing bob and bangs for the better part of a decade. “She just wanted a change,” Sottile said.
Then in December, when Sottile wanted to post a series of photos of haircuts she had done that year, she asked Duwaji if she could include her. She agreed.
After that, things got a bit hectic for Sottile. Since the initial post featuring Duwaji, which drew tens of thousands of likes, Sottile said she has done about five haircuts a week. (Duwaji has since returned to the studio to freshen up the cut, she added.)
Sottile has tried to keep her studio feeling casual and intimate even as it has gotten busier. She takes bookings via direct message on Instagram and has bartered cuts for a handmade vase and social media advice, she said.
She wants every appointment to feel as if “it is just a friend coming over and we’re hanging out,” Sottile said. “I don’t want to ever sacrifice that.”
“It is kind of similar when you go to someone like a tattoo artist,” said Jacob Willner, Sottile’s friend and client. The cut you get depends on “how you’re feeling or how the rest of your day went or what time of day and how she’s feeling — it’s all energy-based.”
“She is kind of winging it,” he added, “but it always comes out perfect.”
That afternoon, Sottile was in the middle of making sheer curtains on a makeshift sewing table to soften the harsh light from the sunsets that bounce off the skyscrapers across the East River.
On a table beside a plush orange sofa, a small dish held a stick of palo santo and something rolled into thin paper. Was it marijuana?
“I don’t know,” said Sottile, shrugging and suppressing a smile.
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