Vidal Sassoon, whose mother had a premonition that he would become a hairdresser and steered him to an apprenticeship in a London shop when he was 14, setting him on the path that led to his changing the way women wore and cared for their hair, died on May 9 in Los Angeles. He was 84.
Sassoon brought a kind of architectural design to the haircut in the late 1950s and early 1960s, developing a look that eschewed the tradition of stiff, sprayed styles with the hair piled high and that dispensed with the need for women to wear hair curlers to bed and make weekly trips to the salon.
For Sassoon, the cut was the thing and he fashioned his clients’ hair into geometric shapes and sharp angles to complement their facial bone structure. His short, often striking styles helped define a new kind of sexy. They were also easy to care for and maintain — the wash-and-wear look, it was sometimes called — and they helped propel the youthful revolution in fashion that gripped London and then America and the rest of the world in the 1960s.
“He changed the way everyone looked at hair,” says Grace Coddington, creative director of American Vogue. “Suddenly you could put your fingers through your hair!” Coddington, who was a model for Sassoon in the 1960s, wore the original version of the quintessential Sassoon style known as the five-point cut, a snug, sleek helmet with a W cut at the nape of the neck and a pointed spike in front of each ear.
Sassoon’s salon on Bond Street in London became a hive of beautiful people, as did the ones he opened on Madison Avenue in New York in 1965 and, afterward, in Beverly Hills. Eventually he operated more than 20. Roman Polanski used the London salon for his film Repulsion starring Catherine Deneuve, and he later created a sensation when he paid Sassoon $5,000 to cut Mia Farrow’s hair for Rosemary’s Baby and invited the news media to see it. The very short cut became Farrow’s signature, and the film proved to be a fine advertisement for him. “It’s Vidal Sassoon!” Farrow says to a shocked character in the film. “It’s very in.”
Sassoon became a business pioneer as well, creating a line of hair products under his name. The shampoos, conditioners and other products were famously sold in television commercials featuring a woman with a lustrous head of hair and the handsome, debonair Sassoon at her side, declaring, “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.” Sales reached more than $100 million annually before he sold the company in 1983.
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Born in London in 1928, Sassoon was the child of poor parents. After his father left the family, he was raised partly in a Jewish orphanage until his mother remarried and reunited with Vidal when he was 11. He was an avid soccer player as a boy — and a lifelong fitness devotee — but he turned to hairdressing after his mother claimed she had a vision of his future. Sassoon opened his first salon in 1954.
Over nine years — inspired, he said, by Bauhaus architecture — he evolved his geometric style. “When I looked at the architecture, the structure of buildings that were going up worldwide, you saw a whole different look, in shape,” he said. “My sense was hairdressing definitely needed to be changing.” He added: “To me hair meant geometry, angles. Cutting uneven shapes, as long as it suited that face and that bone structure.”
A breakthrough came in 1963 when he cut the long hair of the Hong Kong-born actress Nancy Kwan into a bob with sharp face-framing points; photos of what became known as the Kwan bob or the Kwan cut or simply the Kwan appeared in British and American Vogue and on fashion pages around the world.
©2012 The New York Times