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Kelly Hall: The Brunettes Photoshoot

Kelly Hall features in a brunettes-themed photoshoot, a feature built around a single, simple visual idea.

Glamour editors were always looking for an angle, something that would turn a set of pictures into a feature with a headline. Hair colour was one of the easiest and most enduring. Blondes-versus-brunettes issues, redhead specials and themed shoots built around a single look were staples of the UK men's magazines, and this brunettes photoshoot with Kelly Hall comes from that playbook.

A theme like this shapes the whole shoot. With the hair colour fixed, the photographer and stylist tend to work with tones that complement it: warm backgrounds, deep reds and blacks in the wardrobe, and lighting that brings out richness rather than the bright, high-key look often used for blonde features. The result is usually a moodier, slightly more classic set of pictures, closer to old Hollywood portraiture than to a beach shoot.

Themed features also made life easier on the page. A single idea gave the layout a title, a colour palette and a reason to run, and it let editors group models together or set one feature against another in the same issue.

Kelly Hall's shoot is remembered here as an example of that approach: a straightforward concept, carried through consistently. The photographs themselves belong to their publisher and are not reproduced on this page. Other models from the blog's archive are listed in the A–Z index.

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