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News Latest News Hairdressers & my bad hair days at Vogue
Hairdressers & my bad hair days at Vogue |
| News - Latest |
| Written by Alexandra Shulman |
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I expect, utterly '' irrationally, that if I can get my hair to look better at the hairdressers, then the rest of the world will fall into step! A few months ago, I was waiting to have my hair cut at the hairdressers, John Frieda's Mayfair salon. The mirrors make it appear as if the salon goes on and on into infinity an endless row of women sitting with their beige or blue gowns fastened at the neck.  At the hairdressers, I was thinking of something quite other than my hair, when I became intrigued by an elderly-looking woman some where farther along, who appeared deeply unhappy. Her dark hair, waiting to be seen to, was scraped back from her face and allowed a clear view of the lines that ran down from her mouth.
I wondered what had happened to her that afternoon to make her look that discontented, and then spotted that her earrings were exactly the same as mine. Yes, she was me. Not a good moment.
It's probably predictable that I should have looked so miserable. I am not, in general, someone who finds the expedition to the hairdresser an uplifting experience. Whether for a cut, a trim, a blow-dry or colour, it's one that I put off until the last moment, hoping beyond hope that they won't be able to fit me in.
This served me relatively well as a modus vivendi until about a year ago, when I realised I had to change my ways. Because, as Vernon, who whisks me in and out in under an hour at the local Headmasters hairdressers, emphasised: "Women of a certain age recognise the power of a good blow-dry." And I am definitely, now, "of a certain age".
If there's one thing that hairdressers agree on, other than that the person who last cut your hair got it badly wrong, it's that the older the hair is, the more needs to be done to it.
Broadly speaking, I have always liked my hair. As a child somebody occassionaly snipped the odd inch off my thick dark hair, but mainly my hair and I were left alone.
Then, when I was 10, my mother, no doubt fed up with the daily fights over the bird's nest residing at the back of my head, marched me off to Vidal Sassoon on Sloane Street, where the whole lot was chopped off into the hideous geometric style fashionable at that moment.
It was a ghastly mistake and no doubt informed my reaction to hairdressing for years, because throughout the next two decades I scarcely visited one. I was always cutting bits and pieces out of it,experimenting with henna rinses, but I did it myself. My hair and I were free spirits.
It was only at the age of 34, when I became editor of Vogue, that I began to gingerly enter the world of having my hair "done" at the hairdressers. After about six months in the editor's chair, I decided to do something dramatic and asked Nicky Clarke to cut it all off into a pixie crop. But I grew it back again within the year.
A key player in my current arsenal of hair support is the aber-colourist Josh Wood at Real Hair, with whom I discuss the question of age and hair as he pulls out some strands around the hairline to tint — OK, to hid the encroaching grey. "One has to groom more.
It's really simple," he says in his flat Yorkshire tones. "You are dealing with this particular dilemma [going grey]. For some people, it's the texture that changes. They have a whole head of hair they didn'thave before."
The problem is, though, that for me and quite a number of women like me, our relationship with the notion of "grooming" is problematic. "You," Josh says faintly accusingly, "want to have your hair blow-dried, to not look as if you've had your hair blowdried."
He's right, because while the post war generation of young women were delighted by the luxury of having their hair styled after years of austerity, I am a member of the alternative mindset that came next, who admired the long, free-flowing tresses of singers such as Joan Baez, Carly Simon and Joni Mitchell. They would never, I am sure, have had hairdressers blow-dry.
But what one style generation adores, the next frequently kicks back against and in recent years there has been a massive change in our attitude to hair. If I had a daughter, she would no doubt be appalled at the cavalier attitude of my younger self, and she would be weaving as many extensions as she could manage, dropping into blow-dry bars for lunchtime straightening.
Her hair inspiration would come from the heavily-styled Cheryl Cole or Lily Allenor the extremes of Lady Gaga. Unlike my own take-me-as-you-find-me attitude to my hair, girls now like to demonstrate their control over their hair as they do over other aspects of life.
The other factor that my hair heroines shared is that they all had long hair,and if there's one issue that immediately raises its head over the parapet when you discuss hair and age, it's length. It's become a clich that after a certain age you shouldn't wear your hair long but as many women I can think of demonstrate, Jo Wood, Marie Helvin , Helen Storey— this is quite obviously not the case.
If you want to get sociological about it, you could easily argue that long hair in women denotes a fertility that is inappropriateforolderwomentoconveyandtherefore, when this natural order of things gets disturbed, society becomes uncomfortable.
But there's nothing natural about most things in life at the moment, so we don't need to bother too much about that. Demi Moore and Madonna certainly don't.
My friend Isabella came to dinner the other day looking wonderful with her hair loose, hanging down over her shoulders. I realised I hadn't seen her with her hair loose in years, maybe not ever, and asked her why. "Christopher [her husband] doesn't like it. He thinks it makes me look old."
Darren Regan, another of my essential hair-support team (yes, for someone who hates hairdressing salons, I go to a lot), has looked after women for years at John Frieda and says that this is unusual more often it is the husbands who want their wives to keep their hair long.
"When a husband and wife have been together 40 years or something, the husbands still see the 21-year-old with the long hair she had when they first met. A lot of the reason women don't cut their hair is them saying, 'Oh,my husband. He loves my hair long'."
But the association between nostalgia and experience is a major factor in our feelings about our hair. There is a theory that we keep our hair the way it was when we remember being most happy, which makes sense. It also explains why we project a huge responsibility for our emotions on our poor hair.
I know that when life seems to be on the downhill and everything looks bleak—fighting with my son, no cover for the magazine, the mortgage unbearable, I will often blame it on my hair. Well, not exactly blame it, but expect, utterly irrationally, that if I could get my hair to look better,then the rest of the world will fall into step.
I also had no realisation of what a luxury it was to be able to simply scrape my hair back and bang it up with a few old pins and look appealingly dishevelled, rather than a close relation of Worzel Gummidge.
Clearly my ideal, the Joni Mitchell circa 1974 look (does anyone else remember her naked with flowing tresses on the cover of For the Roses?), is not an option in one's fifties (even dressed).
But I wouldn't rule it out for my eighties, especially with all the new hairdressing technologies which mean that it should be possible to keep one's hair in good nick right into the grave. By that time, I feel, I will have earned a licence to look as mutton as I want, and drink and smoke too much while I'm at it.
At my last colour session I commented on how rare it was for me to see an old woman in the room. Everybody seemed a uniform blonde thirty or forty something. "Like her," I said pointing to a woman dressed in a navy dress with airy blonde hair who had just entered the hairdressers.
"Her?" whispered Josh. "That's what 70 looks like now. "Worzel Gummidge, all bets are off.
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 24 August 2010 14:08 |
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