LONDON, United Kingdom — Anthony Turner, 31, is going on holiday. He's palpably excited; it will be his first prolonged period of time off — two weeks in Greece — in quite a while. It's been a busy year for the hair stylist, who has worked on campaigns for Alexander Wang, Balenciaga and Chanel beauty, as well as editorial stories for Interview, i-D and British Vogue, not to mention BoF's own special print issue. Plus, there are 40-odd upcoming fashion week shows, kicking off in September, that he needs to recoup for.

Turner has hardly slept in his own bed since returning to London a few months ago, after eight years of living in New York, first in Carroll Gardens, then in Williamsburg. His grandmother — “she’s my world” — is delighted he’s back in the country. Today, he lives only a stone’s throw from his first East London flat, but Turner grew up in the West Midlands. “It was a little mining town called Cannock in Staffordshire. All my family still live in the same street. It was so normal working class; my mum was a cleaner, my nan was a cleaner, my aunty was a cleaner. My dad used to work in a tyre factory.”

So what was it that prompted him to break away from the banality of it all? “Being gay,” he says. “It really was. I mean, it’s changed a lot now, but it was never as accepted when I was growing up.” At the time, the dance music scene captured his attention. “It was the time of God’s Kitchen and Miss Moneypenny’s in Birmingham and all these crazy club kids. I’d never seen anything like it.” As a 14-year-old, he would soak up the experience from the pages of Mix Mag and Muzik. “Buying those two magazines, I could put faces to the music and see how the kids dressed, spending all week making their outfits for the weekend and looking so out there.”

At 19, Turner moved out of his family’s home with his younger sister, Elena, who he affectionately describes as his sidekick and best friend. Living in Birmingham and searching for an escape from the array of jobs he was juggling to pay their rent — including bartending (where he met his current assistant, David) and stacking shelves in a supermarket — he immersed himself in music and became one of the club kids he had been reading about. But Turner’s sights reached further than the limits of his local city. “That was the time in New York of Limelight and Michael Alig, and Leigh Bowery was still around then. I understood these people needed to belong, they wanted to be part of this scene and they were outcasts, misfits. They came together to create this big family — they did each other’s make up and crazy hair. It was quite a rough way of living, but quite fabulous too.”

Turner's interest in fashion and style had been piqued. "I got really into Alexander McQueen. And I was very into Joel Peter Witkin; I'd educated myself on that. McQueen is the one who got me into fashion." Then, one day, he spotted an advertisement in Toni & Guy for a hair assistant. Always on the lookout for jobs, he applied. Noticing Turner's style, which stood out in the suburban salon, the owner quizzed him on hair stylist Guido Palau. "'You know all those McQueen shows you love?' Mark said to me. 'Well, that's who does the hair and I worked on a few shows with him in London.' That's when I started really paying attention and researching. I love to research, to educate myself. I started to understand what an important part hair played in John Galliano and McQueen's shows. It's an integral part of creating the character."

Turner relocated to London and landed a job in fashionable East London salon Taylor Taylor. Not long afterward, as luck would have it, Guido Palau serendipitously walked into the bar where Turner was having drinks after work with his team. Summoning the courage to approach him, he walked over to Palau and announced, “‘You don't know me but I’m obsessed with your work.’ Two weeks later I was working on New York fashion week with him.”

Six intense years followed, during which Turner assisted the legendary hair stylist on shoots and up to 15 shows at each of the four major fashion weeks. It was an arduous but rewarding time, says Turner, recalling a particular Paris fashion week in October 2010 when the two major shows of the week were one day apart: Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton and Alexander McQueen. "Marc [Jacobs] was at Vuitton and wanted massive afros on the girls, but they literally don't exist that big, so we had to source 700 tiny afros and sew them together through the night. Lee [McQueen] wanted these weird fins and braids for his Atlantis show. I remember sitting in the bath in our tiny hotel in Paris, which was overrun with hairdressers sewing through the night: one set of people sewing wigs for Marc, the others making fins out of coat hangers for McQueen. We were absolutely exhausted, but I remember thinking very clearly at that point, 'This is what I've done it for, this is what it's about.'"

Turner, who, today, is wearing a simple black Comme des Garçons t-shirt, black jeans and sneakers, says Guido taught him a lot about how to conduct himself. "He's not flamboyant, he's so private, he was the best at what he was doing but he didn't need to flaunt it. He never used to walk onto set and be bigger than anybody else." Their creative vision was also aligned. "I was always into what I call Cindy Sherman hair — good taste bad taste — especially coming from where I grew up, where you would see a little old woman sitting at a bus stop with a disgusting bleached beehive with roots, smoking a fag. I was obsessed with that, obsessed with it." This was in stark contrast to the glossy mega-wattage hair favoured by leading magazines at the time. "[Guido and I] were kind of on the same wavelength in a funny way. He's still my hero now."

When Turner decided it was time to go solo, he signed with agency Art Partner and began working regularly with photographer Alasdair McLellan. "Coming where I'm from, and my background, his pictures always spoke volumes to me and I really respected his work. They're not just fashion pictures, there's a narrative and something so tender about them. I think nowadays, it can be quite difficult to feel the love in fashion pictures, they can feel quite cold and cosmetic and overdone — but you see something of his and it has this warmth." Likewise, Turner's work has a realness to it. "I never want it to feel too conceptual — its real, you can feel it, you can touch it."

Self Service S/S 2014 issue shot by Alasdair McLellan, hair by Anthony Turner | Source: Self Service

Today, Turner works with a role call of top photographers, including Mikael Jansson, Willy Vanderperre, Mario Sorrenti and Craig McDean. "I enjoy working with different photographers who help me focus on different areas of my imagination. It's about understanding each and every photographer and the way they work. Willy has a very poetic approach; it's very Belgian. I always think there's something quite sexy about his little nuances in a very dark, understated way."

A hair look can come together very organically while shooting on set, or be the result of days — even weeks — of storyboarding. The planning behind Gisele’s buzz cut for the Balenciaga Autumn/Winter 2014 campaign was meticulous. “That was two weeks of sleepless nights for me and my assistant. We had a meeting with Pascal [Dangin] who is an incredible re-toucher and art director. He said, ‘This is what we want to do, you've got two weeks to figure it out.’ The Balenciaga campaigns are known for being dynamic, changing a girl in a sense, and we wanted to push it even more. What do you think of when you think of Gisele? You think of hair. So what could we do with that? You take it away.” The cut itself was done on another model and superimposed digitally, using a tiny wig on the day of the shoot.

Gisele Bundchen with a buzzed cut in Balenciaga A/W 2014 campaign | Source: Balenciaga

Turner also works also with men's hair and clocked up shows for JW Anderson, Dior and Thom Browne this past June. "There are still boundaries with men's hair. You can push it into areas that are a little bit unknown; there are more rules to be broken. It's putting a little bit of myself into it too."

So what does he carry in his kit bag? “A box of PG Tips [tea],” he only half jokes. “Three hairdryers, every size of curling iron that you can imagine, every sized flat iron because they do vary, two bags of wigs, one bag of extensions, and then something that my assistant calls ‘the fun bag,’” a collection of cyber-goth hair pieces and cartoon eyeball hair bobbles mostly collected from Japan.

For respite, Turner draws, something he has done for years: “little Tim Burton-esque figures that hone in on my darker side. It’s like therapy I guess.” His arms are covered in tattoos of an Aubrey Beardsley print, though these will soon be worked over and replaced by something even more decadent and detailed, he reveals. But Turner also hankers for a certain normality, which is also very much a part of him. “All I’ve ever really wanted is a house, a dog, a great boyfriend and kids. All I want is a very stable, normal life.”

“I don't think if I wasn't being true to myself I would be where I am now. All this time, I never forget where I’ve come from; my friends, all those crazy people that I met when I was out. Even now I might be on set and I’ll think, ‘Well, what would Chrissy Darling do?’ If I pushed all of that to one side, I would be lost in a way. I couldn't do it any other way.”