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Published: 26 May 2011
by MATTHEW LEWIN

THE man who revolutionised the way women look, and changed the nature of hairdressing for ever, told an audience at the Hampstead Everyman cinema: “It’s been an absolutely riveting 83-year adventure, and I have loved every minute of it.”

Vidal Sassoon was speaking after a screening of the film, Vidal Sassoon: The Movie, which documents his extraordinary rise from poverty and an East End orphanage, through fighting fascists on the streets of London and serving as a soldier in the Israeli war of independence, to being “the most influential hairdresser who ever lived” according to one of his colleagues.

The film was produced by a former hairdressing colleague, Michael Morgan, who joined Sassoon for the Q&A session.

Sassoon was born in Shepherd’s Bush in 1928, but after his parents divorced his mother was forced by poverty to put him in an orphanage from the age of five to 11.

He was evacuated during the war and when he came back to London, aged 14, he worked first as a glove cutter and then a bicycle messenger boy before his mother decided that he should pursue a profession.

Sassoon told the audience.“My mother took me to a hairdresser, Adolph Cohen in Whitechapel Road in the East End, and asked him to train me. He wanted to charge her 100 guineas for the apprenticeship, and she replied: ‘I don’t even have a hundred buttons!’.

“He saw me smile politely – I was happy because I didn’t want to be a hairdresser – and he saw me open the door for my mother and usher her through and doff my cap to the boss. He followed us out and said: ‘I see you are a nice polite young man with good manners. Forget about the 100 guineas, start on Monday’. My mother’s face lit up, and I was a bit sad, but it hasn’t worked out too badly.”

In 1948, at the age of 20, he went to Israel and fought in the war of independence. But even before that he was fighting his corner.

“There was a group of 43 servicemen who came back from the Second World War only to find fascists marching around London shouting things like: ‘We’ve got to get rid of the Yids’. 

“The 43 Group, as they were known, called for volunteers and I joined immediately, and I swear that within 18 months to two years we cleaned the fascists off the streets of London. When I was a kid, being Jewish, I was looked at not only with suspicion but with much antagonism because we were different. I always had a sense of having to prove something to myself, and I just couldn’t sit at home while there were thugs like that running around the streets.”

After his stint as a shampoo boy and trainee in Mr Cohen’s salon, he went to work for the famous hairdresser, “Teasy Weasy” Raymond, before setting up his own little salon in New Bond Street in 1954.

“I decided I had to change things,” said Sassoon. “I knew what I didn’t want to do, and I found that when I was on the right track, it lit up like a beacon.”

He famously refused to do back-combing, and insisted that he be allowed to decide what to do. 

Sassoon was inspired by architecture, the Bauhaus architects in particular. “It was all geometry and angles, and just like the bone structures of a face,” he said. “It taught me to eliminate the superfluous and get down to the basic angles of cut and shade.”

His really big breakthrough came in 1963 when he moved to bigger premises, in Bond Street, and developed his distinctive and groundbreaking “five-point cut” which he first used with the actress Nancy Kwan. Shortly after that he was flown to the US to do Mia Farrow’s iconic haircut for Rosemary’s Baby. And he never looked back.

“What we tried to do was give the craft was a certain respect,” said Sassoon. “We also felt things had to change, and I was much more influenced by architecture than by fashion, which is very elitist.” 

He later became the first hairdresser to market his own range of products and the first to open academies to train other hairdressers.

“It wasn’t just what I was doing,” said Sassoon. “It was the huge change that was happening in Britain in the Sixties. Suddenly there was this meritocracy in all walks of life. The class system didn’t seem to matter so much, what mattered were the people with talent who came to London and decided to do things differently.

“I worked with Mary Quant from 1957 when she came in for a haircut and I cut her ear. It bled all over the show and we both pretended to ignore it.”

He was also asked why he had decided to open hairdressing academies. “When you develop a system and other people want it, do you keep it to yourself? No, you take it as far as you can. We took it worldwide and at the moment we even have a second academy in Shanghai with hundreds of Chinese hairdressers learning our methods.”

He recalled he was once in a restaurant with his wife, Ronnie, when he saw a beautiful blonde woman come in with a superb hairstyle.

“I said to Ronnie, ‘I’ve got to go and find out who did that.’ So I went over and asked her who did her hair, and she said: ‘You did, this morning!’”

• Vidal Sassoon: The Movie is showing at the Hampstead Everyman today, Sunday and Monday; and at the Curzon Mayfair until June 2