The New Orleans Hair Salon Where Customers Fly in for Appointments
Bandit Hair Company gives gender-affirming haircuts while bolstering the local LGBTQ+ community.
Hair holds power, especially for members of the LGBTQ+ community, for whom a good haircut can be life changing. Not only is hair a tool for self expression and gender presentation, but an outlet for creativity and self care. New Orleans, a city with an abundance of queer pride, has one of the few places in the country where you can get a gorgeous gender-affirming cut and gossip openly about your love life, whatever it looks like: Bandit Hair Company.
Bandit Hair Company was founded by Hannah Peterson in 2019, as a way to create a safe, comfortable hair care hub for her queer community. After working for more than a decade in salons and barber shops in Seattle and New Orleans, Peterson dreamed of opening a gender-neutral space for her locale clientele. For the last five years, the shop has been so successful that people travel across state lines to experience it.
The shop is named for her adorable dog, Bandit, but it was also important to Peterson that she diverge from the women’s salon vs men’s barber shop dichotomy so she chose the inclusive, non-gendered “company” moniker instead.
“I want it to feel like you’re going into a friend’s home,” Peterson said of the space. So the shop is cozy and inviting with warm lighting, a plethora of plants, a bookcase filled with queer literature and zines, a disco ball, and local art.
Leyla Hekmatdoost—who drives an hour from Covington, Louisiana, on the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain to get her hair cut at Bandit—says a feeling of comfort washes over her from the moment she walks in. From colorful stickers on the door celebrating body positivity and beautiful portraits of trans people hanging in the bathroom to the way conversations in the shop can be boisterous and silly or sensitive and profound, every detail is designed to facilitate a truly welcoming safe space for queer community.
Hekmatdoost’s partner, Shannon Parr, goes to Bandit Hair Company, too. Parr followed their beloved stylist KP to Bandit Hair Company near the end of the COVID-19 lockdown.
“My hair’s been short forever,” Parr says. “In Covington, it’s hard to find someone who will cut an androgynous cut. If you ask for it short at a salon, they’ll give you a very feminine pixie cut, and barbers around here will barely even let a woman sit in the chair. I started using clippers on my own hair eventually.”
The first time KP cut their hair, they said they felt “euphoria.” It was the first time they walked out of the salon with that extra pep in your step that comes from feeling confident and beautifully seen.
“KP was one of the people who made me very comfortable expressing myself the way I wanted to,” Parr says. “This is how I’ve wanted my hair to look forever. That haircut literally saved my life.”
In addition to Peterson, three other colorists and stylists currently work at Bandit Hair Company: Glynn Bai (she/her), KP (they/she), and Zachary Chadwick (he/they). The shop operates under a collective model, so Peterson provides the space but each stylist maintains their own client list and retains the profits from their work.
Hekmatdoost and Parr aren’t the only clients to travel long distances to benefit from Bandit’s services. Peterson shares that one client regularly flies in from Florida to have her hair cut and colored by Bai, because it was important to find a queer Asian woman to do her hair. Other clients drive for hours from other parts of Louisiana like Baton Rouge and other southern states like Mississippi to get their hair done at Bandit Hair Company.
Every Bandit stylist has had the privilege of giving someone their first gender-affirming haircut, including several teenagers. Peterson said she remembers a young man whose parents had required him to present as a girl and keep his hair long. When he turned 16, his only birthday request was to be able to finally cut his hair off. Hannah gave him his first masculine cut—he cried, and she did too.
Violet Falgout is a 17-year-old trans woman who, like many Bandit customers, had spent years having the frustrating experience of stylists and barbers not listening to what she wanted. For her first haircut with Peterson, she said she wanted something feminine with bangs. Something that would catch people’s eye and make them ask her, “what are your pronouns?”
She says she has a picture of herself after she got her first cut at Bandit. “I have the biggest smile on my face,” she recalls. “The salon means so much to me because of the support system that it provides.”
Bandit Hair Company was Falgout’s first introduction into queer community, and meeting the stylists and other clients there has helped her realize there are other people like her in her home city and, more broadly, in the South. Falgout credits her first haircut at Bandit with giving her the confidence to continue her transition.
“After my first appointment, seeing how my hair framed my face, how it genuinely changed how people perceived me and I perceived myself gave me the confidence to come out to my parents, to my friends, and to live as my true self,” she says. “That’s huge, I don’t think I would have gotten to that point as easily without having this space for me.”
Parr adds that Bandit stylists don’t make any assumptions: about your pronouns, your gender, or your romantic entanglements. “You can go to an accepting salon or place, but you can’t guarantee the clientele are going to be accepting,” Parr says. “The freedom when you’re in a queer space, to never have that fear of who’s watching, who’s judging, am I going to get hurt? That’s the most amazing thing for me.”
The shop has weathered its fair share of challenges in its lifetime, from the COVID-19 pandemic shuttering the shop just six months after it opened, to Hurricane Ida forcing the shop to close for weeks in late summer 2021. Days after reopening, the shop was broken into and everything was stolen, from stylists’ tools to the sound system. Although the damages amounted to approximately $4,000, the insurance company cut a check for just $600.
But time and again—in true New Orleans fashion—community members take care of each other, and within days the stylists were able to crowdfund the money to replace their tools. As a testament to its importance in the New Orleans queer scene, the shop was featured on Season 7 of Queer Eye.
As the shop grows, Peterson hopes to expand Bandit from simply a hair studio into a full-on queer wellness center, offering services from “counseled” haircuts that are given with a mindfulness lens to other treatments like manicures, massages, facials, and acupuncture.
Peterson also plans to offer apprenticeships for “baby queer” stylists who are building their portfolio of skills. “[Something like that] would have been life changing,” Peterson says of the studio. “I probably would have felt more comfortable with myself. I want everyone that walks through the door—from coworkers to clients—to feel safe and that they’re going to be taken care of.”