The £1,000 haircut you can't get

Rossano Ferretti, the man Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek and the Duchess of Cambridge trust their hair with, opens a salon in Bangalore

Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was recently spotted at his salon in London by the ever-vigilant paparazzi, sparking a media frenzy. “I have received over 70 phone calls from journalists since,” says Rossano Ferretti, founder of the eponymous chain of boutique hairdressing salons, or hair spas, the latest of which he opened at the Ritz-Carlton in Bangalore last week. The hair spa at the Ritz is his third in India and 21st globally.

Apart from his celebrity client roster, said to include Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek and other Hollywood A-listers, it’s the astronomical prices of his haircuts that has raised my curiosity. What kind of magic was he wielding with his scissors which made people willing to shell out a neat £1,000 (a little over a lakh of rupees)? Alas, Ferretti declines to demonstrate. “I only cut hair for charity these days, I promise,” he demurs. An anti-climax, if ever there was one. He is also tight-lipped about his clients, saying that if he talked about them they would not come back to his salon.

But the 53-year-old, who has been cutting hair since he was 14 in Parma in Italy, where his grandfather worked as a barber, is willing enough to talk about his method and what his team member, Carlos Saavedra, would be offering in Bangalore. It all begins with a conversation between the hairdresser and the client. “I really need to connect — I need to know your thoughts, your dreams, your frustrations, what you like, what you don't like... If I don’t know you, how can I make you happy?” says Ferretti. Ironically, instead of a shining mop of hair, Ferretti himself has a smooth, bald pate.

The Metodo Rossano Ferretti, which he has patented, is based on enhancing the natural flow of the hair instead of going against the hair, which every hairdresser in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s was obsessed with doing, he says. “That destroys the hair. Hair will always go where it wants to go.” To demonstrate the method, Saavedra gets to work on Ellen Vollmer, a mother of two toddlers and one of the hotel’s “high spenders”. Over a cup of coffee earlier, Vollmer had been asked about her daily routine and lifestyle and she had made it clear that she was a practical person. With two young children who ensure she’s on her feet since 5 am every day, she said she needed something low-maintenance but not too short. While cutting, Saavedra at times contorts his body into postures that would not have been alien to a ballet dancer, but which he assures me are necessary if he has to follow the natural fall of the hair. “The big surprise is, after one week or one month, your hair will grow organically in the perfect way because we cut the hair organically, following the natural fall,” interjects Ferretti, clearly also  an excellent marketer.

The cut takes nearly an hour, at the end of which Vollmer’s hair, though not drastically different, does look pretty good. “I’m very happy. It’s different in style and feels different even to touch,” she says. The “invisible cut” is supposed to be another Ferretti trademark, where the lines of the cut are not evident. All the hairdressers at his salons are trained in Parma by Ferretti’s sister, for anywhere between four months and a year. In Bangalore, prices start at Rs 4,500 and can go up to Rs 7,000 which is still expensive but at least, not a thousand pounds.

But even that figure pales in comparison, if one were to go by some of Ferretti’s stories. Six years ago, he says, a girl in Taipei wanted him for her wedding. When her five calls proved futile, she got her father on the line who claimed to be the most powerful man in Taipei and offered to pay “any money” for Ferretti to come over. Ferretti says he wanted to know how much that would be and told his assistant to ask for $50,000 for what was essentially a 10-minute job. “The next day, we had the money in the account.”

So would it really be next to impossible to get one’s hair cut by Rossano Ferretti if you were not a Hollywood star, British royalty or did not have $50,000 lying around?  “It would be difficult. That’s not because I want to be posh but because I don’t have time. If I give you an appointment, I would have to change it five times,” he says. Meanwhile, as he points out, there is always his team.