By Helen Olsson By Helen Olsson | July 5, 2023 | People Feature, Style & Beauty, Community, Apple News,
MATTHEW MORRIS IS ON A MISSION TO BRING DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION TO LUXURY SALONS.
Celebrity stylist Matthew Morris is bringing equity to the beauty industry. PHOTO BY CAROLINE MILLER
MATTHEW MORRIS, who gained acclaim with an appearance on Bravo’s Shear Genius, is a longtime backstage fixture at New York Fashion Week, doing hair and makeup for models like Karlie Kloss and Gigi Hadid. “The event is very international, and models are coming in with all kinds of different hair,” Morris says. “But they wouldn’t want to sit in my chair because I’m white—they didn’t think I could do their hair.”
But he could. Morris, who grew up in Glenwood Springs, learned to style hair at Denver’s Emily Griffith Opportunity School. “At that moment in time, there happened to be eight Black girls and me in the class,” he says. “I learned how to style all types of hair.” Morris is not the norm, however.
Matthew Morris has three salons in Denver. PHOTO BY: JORDAN HOLLOWAY
For decades, Western beauty standards have primarily focused on white hair and skin, from limited shades of makeup foundation to an overall lack of understanding around styling multi-ethnic hair types. “We’ve heard nightmare stories about Black women being turned away from luxury salons,” Morris says. “Anyone with any hair type should be able to walk into a salon with confidence.”
Morris started his eponymous salon (matthewmorrissalon.com) in Denver in 2006, and it’s since grown to three salons with 60 talented stylists and locations in RiNo, the Denver Tech Center and on Broadway. In 2019, Morris moved to New York to join L’Oreal as artistic director. The following summer was a turning point for him. “Everyone was under quarantine, but all of New York went outside to protest for Black Lives Matter,” he says. “It was really inspirational.”
Several years prior, Morris and his partners had purchased a beauty school in Westminster and christened it Elevate Salon Institute. When he returned to Colorado, he made it his mission to create a more equitable space within the beauty industry. “We have a very diverse staff that can teach multi-ethnic hair principles,” he says.
From the beginning, the stylist learned to cut all types of hair. PHOTO BY: CAROLINE MILLER
He established the Matthew Morris Scholarship Fund (mmsalonscholarship.com) to support aspiring BIPOC stylists, teaching them to style all types of hair with the goal of guaranteed placement in luxury salons. Each September, the salon puts on an anniversary show that’s a night of beauty, fashion and community to raise funds for the scholarship fund. This year, the salon is partnering with Color of Fashion, a Black- and woman-owned nonprofit, and the event will focus on BIPOC Denver designers. Morris also recently hired Orlando Martinez to head up the salon’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. “He’s going out into the community and making sure that people know they’ll be seen and heard in our salons.”
“Salons should be equalizers,” Morris says. “You can have a CEO sitting next to a rapper—all having safe conversations within that space.”
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