"Many people helped to mould me. In doing so, they brought me to the end of an era. I realised that the time had come for me to do some moulding! Around me I could see clothes that had a wonderful shape to them, and all because of their cutting. I wanted to see hair keeping up with fashion, maybe jumping ahead of it, leading it along a certain line, instead of lagging behind it. I wanted to shape heads as the new young fashion designers were shaping bodies. I wanted to cut hair as they cut cloth. I wanted to be in on the revolution that was simmering," Vidal Sassoon, Sorry I Kept You Waiting, Madam (1968).
Vidal Sassoon, famous for his sharply precise architectural hairstyles like his trademark five-point bob, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles, at the age of 84. As a tribute, I’m republishing an extract of a phone interview I did with him when Craig Teper’s documentary Vidal Sassoon: The Movie (2010) came out.
This particular extract (edited and reassembled in a video format by Kutmusic) is rather interesting as Sassoon speaks about his first job in a glove factory, his architectural and fashion influences in the ‘60s (Mary Quant, André Courrèges, Ungaro, Rudi Gernreich), anatomy and hairdressing, the creation of different hairstyles for designers such as Mila Schön and the importance of encouraging your apprentices and of always challenging yourself.
Born in London in January 1928, Sassoon lived in an orphanage with his brother for six years after their father abandoned his family. Evacuated during the war, he returned to London at 17 when he started working as a barber’s apprentice.
Opening his own salon in Bond Street in 1958, Sassoon radically changed hairdressing creating revolutionary cuts.
Influenced by architecture, geometry and the Bauhaus, Sassoon banished the extravagance of shapes and proportions of the ‘50s and came up with innovative styles and shapes becoming one of the fashionable symbols of the Swinging London.
Among his famous clients there were also fashion designer Mary Quant, models Peggy Moffitt and Jean Shrimpton and actors such as Terence Stamp and Mia Farrow (he created her cut in the 1968 film Rosemary's Baby).
Mini-skirts may have liberated women in the ‘60s, but, as Mary Quant wrote in her autobiography: “Vidal Sassoon liberated women from the punishment of hours spent under the bonnet of a hairdryer, with fat rollers skewered to their scalps, while being par-boiled (…) Vidal Sassoon, the Pill and the mini-skirt changed everything. For me, Vidal Sassoon produced the perfect cap on my leggy mini-skirted designs and the frame for my Colour Cosmetics.”
As the years passed, Sassoon opened hairdressing schools and salons all over the world and launched lines of hair-care and hairstyling products.
A veteran of Israel's 1948 war of independence, he founded in the early ‘80s the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Married four times, Sassoon had four children with his second wife, Canadian actor Beverly Adams. He is survived by his fourth wife Ronnie (Rhonda) Holbrook, a designer, and three of his children.
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