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Vidal Sassoon - Straitened start for sultan of snippers |
| Top Hairdressers - Vidal Sassoon | ||||||
| Written by Lisa Armstrong | ||||||
Page 1 of 4 Vidal Sassoon tells Lisa Armstrong how he transformed British hairdressing and why his CBE has come just in time. It felt as though the scissors were making love to her hair.
ALTHOUGH I admire Vidal Sassoon gallantry, especially as it's only 9.45am, I am a bit sceptical when Vidal Sassoon, 82 (but still flamboyantly chiselled, twinkly, thin and a CBE), glides up from behind while I am bent over my bicycle and says, ``What a lovely view.'' Because slick patter is pretty much what you expect from a 1960s hairdressing superstar.
 This was the era when, unlike today's snippers, who have to put up with the spectre of Bruno mincing around their auras, hairdressers were extravagantly heterosexual sex gods, all jaunty entrepreneurial showmanship and phallic hairdryers.
I'm not just thinking of Vidal, I'm thinking of Justin de Villeneuve (by common consent not a great hairdresser but definitely a great showman), of Leonard (cutter to Twiggy and the Beatles) and, later, John Frieda. And obviously I'm thinking of Warren Beatty in Shampoo.
``That was the 70s, and California,'' Vidal corrects me in his fruity 60s-thesp voice, once we are installed in a booth upstairs at the Electric in London's Notting Hill.
``But yes,'' twinkle, twinkle, ``the salon floor was a great way to meet women.''
Sometimes the women cried. But only because after 1963, when he invented the Nancy Kwan cut (closely followed by the Mary Quant bob, the five-point cut and the Grecian goddess), he kept shearing off all their hair. ``I had three or four weepers a year,'' he says breezily. ``Often they would call back and say: `Everyone likes it', or `What are you going to do about my hair?'''
A testy duke of Bedford asked him why he insisted on making his wife look like a lesbian, but Vidal didn't think his clients looked like lesbians. He thought they looked modern, liberated, which they were: liberated from the rollers, perming, setting, back-combing, huge dryers and the humungous output of aerosol particles that constituted a trip to the salon throughout the 50s.
Vidal Sassoon, despite having trained with ``Mr Teasy Weasy'' himself, the great Raymond of Mayfair, had sensed, as a new decade dawned, that the days of teasing and weasing were numbered. The signs could be divined everywhere, even in architecture: ``You had only to look at [Ludwig] Mies's [van der Rohe] Seagram [a 1957 New York skyscraper] or [Marcel] Breuer's Whitney [the 1966 art museum, also in New York] to know.''
Or, indeed, at those geometric 60s clothes. Vidal Sassoon clipped 1m from Kwan's hair. ``All the press came to watch and this marvellous hair tumbled to the ground. It felt as though my scissors were making love to her hair.''
I expect this looks cheesy weesy written down. But the models got it, even if the duke didn't. None complained, even when he cut off all their hair without warning them the night before a Quant fashion show. The magazines got it: Vogue immediately popped him in its next issue, declaring that, finally, ``hair looks like hair again''.
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 24 August 2010 21:18 |
