“Zoe Kravitz’s braids are an epidemic,” says one TikTok user in a video with over 300,000 likes. Everyone remembers where they were when they first saw Kravitz debut the look: classically boho, loosely undone, somehow both effortlessly French and unmistakably Californian, yet fundamentally Black. The look sparked a phenomenon unlike any hairstyle since the mod bob, and just as many failed imitations. Suddenly, her image was everywhere: pinned to salon advertisements, saved to photo albums titled ‘hair inspo’ and whispered in stylist consultations across the country. We all wanted the same thing, asking: “How can we get our braids like Zoe Kravitz’s?”
In Crown Heights, New York, I sit down with Susy Oludele, the creator of the famed braids, in her salon. The walls, covered in color and portraits of her work, show just how much her practice is celebrated in real time. Oludele, born to Nigerian parents, admits that although braiding is a practice passed down through generations in West Africa, it wasn’t what initially drew her to the craft. “I didn’t start braiding because of culture I started because it was survival,” she says.
In the beginning, Oludele braided simply because it was a “skill I had. It helped me make money and support myself.” She continues, “It wasn’t until later that I understood the depth of what I was carrying in my hands, that in Nigerian and many African cultures, hair is a language. It was community, but as a kid, I didn’t realize it was also history, spirituality, and art.”
And like all practices of high-art, spirituality, and religion, Oludele wants the world to “respect” braids, stating, “I want people to understand that braiding isn’t a ‘trend’ it’s a cultural technology created by African women, passed through generations, long before it was commercialized.”
For her, braids do more than communicate style, they communicate identity. In pre-colonial West African civilizations, distinctive braid patterns were used to identify tribe, age, status, and spirituality. Braids were so integral to West African survival that, during the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved Africans encoded escape routes into their braiding patterns and wove grains of rice into their hair as a means of sustenance when faced with starvation. “Today, my heritage is the foundation of my work. You can see it in the precision of my braid patterns inspired by Yoruba textiles, Benin artistry, and traditional African geometry.”
Those heretical emblems appears in some of her most intricate and widely recognized work, like Beyoncé’s Hold Up music video, where Oludele famously coined the style and term “lemonade braids.”
“That was the first time I created that specific side-parted, scalp-hugging cornrow look using human hair so it moved naturally and felt soft, spiritual, and rooted in African tradition,” she says.
It’s hard not to remember the first sight of the Hold Up music video: Beyoncé gallivanting down the street, windmilling a bat, her feathered mustard dress dancing in the air as she skips and swings into a car window. Her braids, geometrically braided in side-pattern cornrows on the top and box braids on the lower half, flowing in the air in unison.
The opportunity arose through what she describes as “trust and timing.” Oludele had braided Solange’s (Beyonce’s younger sister) hair for several years, and through that relationship, she says, “I was brought onto projects within the family.”
“I wanted the braids to feel like a crown but still move with her when she danced, so I kept the parts clean but organic, used human hair for softness, and laid the braids diagonally across the scalp to frame her face,” she says.
Oludele describes her practice as treating hair like a “ritual—slow, intentional, almost meditative,” she says. And it’s true. While I sat in her chair, she emphasized the importance of sustaining and nurturing your natural hair rather than relying solely on protective styles. She braided each box braid with care, imparting each plat with precision. Before she even touched my hair, it felt as if an hour had passed while she discussed the intentionality behind which braiding-hair color I should use versus the one I had initially chosen.
“I spent hours perfecting tension, symmetry, sectioning. If a part was crooked, I would take it out and start again. But that kind of practice is straightforward, you do it until your hands know it better than your mind,” she says.
While hours passed by in the chair (a feeling I’m all too familiar with), the fatigue set in and I couldn’t help but ask about the iconic Zoë Kravitz braids (even though I had come in with a reference photo of Justine Skye’s blonde boho braids). She surrendered, “The first time I braided Zoe’s [Kravitz] hair was for her movie Dope. That was our introduction: clean, minimalist braids that matched the character and her natural beauty. But after that, we wanted to evolve the look,” she prefaces.
She continues, “the next time, we experimented, we used human hair instead of synthetic to create, what is now known, as her signature braids. They were softer, lighter, more natural, they moved like real hair, not extensions. That’s the look the world ended up falling in love with.”
At the time, Oludele wasn’t thinking, ‘This is going to be iconic.’ She was thinking about what felt authentic to Kravitz’s “face and her energy. But looking back, that decision to use human hair, to make it effortless and undone helped shape a whole generation of braids.” And that it did, it’s impossible to walk down the street without seeing the influence of the monikered braids.
She leans in, “I don’t do sharp box parts for Zoe’s [Kravitz braids]. I like the parts to be slightly irregular so the braids fall in a way that feels effortless and real, like naturally growing hair.”
She continues, “I start by grabbing small, organic sections instead of perfectly squared parts. Then I braid knotless from the root so there’s no tension or bulky knots.” As she braids down, she feeds in small pieces of human hair “little by little until I reach the length the client wants. I repeat that same rhythm over the whole head.” She finishes the braids by tying and burning the tips of the hair or leaving them natural. “It’s very deliberate, but it still feels undone. Clean but lived-in, that’s the magic,” she says.
With its impact comes recreation, and recreations are often done, bluntly put, wrong. “First, it’s not just small box braids,” she says. “Second, it’s not synthetic. A lot of people recreate it using synthetic braiding hair, which gives a heavier, shinier, more rigid result. The original look was done with human hair because it falls, moves, and ages more like natural hair.”
It’s also not meant to be overly sleek or over-styled. You’re not supposed to see hard “baby hairs, gelled edges, or dipped ends that look too finished,” according to Oludele. “The style lives in that space between polished and lived-in—simple, quiet, almost poetic.”
Although Oludele’s most recognized work is what we see on celebrities — wearable and natural— her bread and butter is high-art, editorial, sculptural hair pieces. And while appreciated by her internal network and over 57k followers on Instagram, she still faces setbacks and internal doubts. “I didn’t see anyone doing what I envisioned, braids as sculpture, braids as architecture, braids as art. There wasn’t a guidebook or mentor for that, so every new style felt like uncharted territory,” she says. She continues, “On top of that, there were emotional challenges: being young, African, a woman, and pursuing something people didn’t even have language for yet.” There were moments she told herself her ideas were “too much,” “too cultural,” or “not commercial enough.”
“But that lack of roadmap actually became my advantage. It forced me to build one of my own,” she says.