Vidal Sassoon cutting Mary Quant’s hair

“Had I gone to college, I would have definitely been an architect. That would have been my dream.” - Vidal Sassoon

Creative inspiration can come from many places. Our wide-ranging interests come out to play and begin to interact with our core discipline or craft. The architect might love something like painting, producing built offspring cognizant of its two-dimensional parent. Or perhaps, in the reverse, the painter embraces architecture, capturing the dramatic geometries, angles, and curves present in great cities. Why does cross-disciplinary influence appear to be so advantageous within the creative process? It seems to produce extraordinary outcomes. It would be an undertaking to try and provide an empirical response. Rather, this piece is a short story of a man who took his fascination of architecture and used it to revolutionize an industry. He took the formal ideas of architecture, introduced them to the human head, and became an international tycoon.

A Reluctant Calling

After returning from the war, a young Vidal Sassoon decided to continue his career in hairdressing. The ex-soldier desperately wished to pursue a different career path but did not have skills in any other trade. When he was 14 years old, his mother had a premonition and told the adolescent boy that he was going to be a hairdresser. “She sat me down and told me of her ambitions for me. I listened but didn’t really take it in. She talked of hairdressing as a profession, but I wanted to become a footballer. I could not imagine myself backcombing hair and winding up rollers for a living,” Sassoon wrote in his autobiography. After much debate, the boy’s mother triumphed, dressed him in his best clothes, and “frog-marched” him into the salon of Adolf Cohen. 

Cohen was respected among the local community of East End London where Sassoon lived. “There was a well-earned admiration for him in hairdressing circles,” Sassoon wrote. After a long conversation, his mother had secured him an apprenticeship, free of charge, at Cohen’s salon. Rather or not the aspiring athlete concurred, he was now on a path that would transform his life forever.

The Apprentice Grows

Despite his disappointment, Vidal quickly commenced his training along with a group of other young apprentices. “Even if he’s a natural and picks up the craft easily, it will take at least two years of study, and many more before he becomes truly good,” Cohen had told his mother. Vidal spent the first few months scrubbing floors, cleaning mirrors, and learning how to properly shampoo the clients’ hair. When the shop was empty, the more experienced stylists would teach the young pupils different techniques on old wigs. After about six months of practice, Sassoon was ready to cut his first real head of hair.

Six months soon became eighteen, and after much practice, Sassoon was given his first client, a true reward for his labor. He was beginning to gain confidence and enjoyed the challenge of cutting hair. But, the growing apprentice, by his own account, was only average; he did not stand out in any way among the other apprentices. Had his mother’s premonition been wrong?

Leaving the Master

“...he instilled in me the belief that hairdressing, at its best, is an art form that requires discipline.” - Vidal Sassoon, on Adolf Cohen

Vidal continued his work with Cohen, learning methodically and diligently. Cohen lived above the salon and would spend hours of one on one time with Vidal, teaching him the step by step process of how to color hair, make bleach, anything the young practitioner needed to work on. “Adolf Cohen had such great pride in the craft of hairdressing it was contagious,” Sassoon writes.

But eventually, Sassoon yearned for something new, and with the blessing of his teacher, was told to always seek out the best to learn from. “If I wasn’t learning, I lost interest, so I could not keep a job. I was constantly being fired,” he remembered. There was a ferocious desire to continually improve every day for the emerging stylist. If he felt that he had mastered a concept or style, he grew tired. Soon, he became determined to be the best that he could be, and if he felt anyone was holding him back he moved on. As a result, he worked for a variety of established hairdressers, absorbing everything he could from each of their approaches. 

From Practitioner to Soldier

Vidal Sassoon was Jewish and was born in 1928. While he was an apprentice at Cohen’s shop, it was the height of World War II. Living in London, the presence of the war was unavoidable, but the boy was too young to serve. In 1946, a year after the war had ended, and now 18 years old, Vidal, the adult man, began to embrace his Jewish heritage. He soon became the youngest member of the English anti-fascist 43 Group, which consisted of primarily Jewish ex-serviceman and young recruits. The group’s primary goal was to break up fascist anti-semitic meetings across London.

After two more years of working at four different salons, Sassoon, at the age of 20, joined the Palmach as a private and fought in the 1948 War of Independence in Israel in response to the Nation’s Declaration of Independence that same year. Vidal would later describe this time as the best year of his life. It drastically transformed the young man, and when it came time to return to London he took some time to transition back to city life. The homecoming was warm, but now the battled veteran had to find work.

A Dream is Kindled

“I worked for him for about a year, watching his every move as he cut and pruned hair into shape with just a pair of scissors." - Vidal Sassoon, on Raymond Bessone

Sassoon did not intend to return to hairdressing, but after he was unable to find a promising job in a different field he had to surrender to what he knew. Once again, remembering the advice of his old master, Sassoon sought the best hairdressers to learn from, securing a position with the famous Raymond Bessone. “He really taught me how to cut hair,” Sassoon recalled. But after some time with Raymond, the now-twenty-six-year-old professional desired to make his stamp on the world. He was ready to have his own salon, but he had something very different in mind. “I made my mind up that if I was going to be in hair long-term I wanted to change things.” And change things he did.

The Architecture of Hair

“When I look at the architecture, the structure of buildings that were going up worldwide, you saw a whole different look and shape. My sense was that hairdressing definitely needed to be changing.” - Vidal Sassoon

Sassoon opened his first salon in 1954 and it took him about nine years to really figure out what it was that he wanted to do. “I wasn’t sure would hair should be, but I was sure what it shouldn’t be,” he said. The agonizing journey to change such an established industry began to take a toll on the ambitious businessman. “I’d often sit in my flat and feel that I was wasting my time.” He struggled with how to make a difference. He knew that he did not want to do things the old way, but discovering his vision took time.

As he worked, developed his team, and grew his clientele, Sassoon began to tap into his deep love of architecture. “Great architects is where I came from. That was my inspiration. The Bauhaus, architecture...For me, hair meant geometry, angles, bone structure, cutting uneven shapes, as long as it suited that face and that bone structure,” he expressed later in his life. He wanted to eliminate the superfluous and get down to the basic shapes and geometries. This connection and inspiration to architecture became his driving force for the rest of his career.

The Architect of Hair

“Its architecture had made an extraordinary mark on the way I felt about cities. Great structures like Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, made it clear that modern architecture led the way.” - Vidal Sassoon, on his first visit to the United States

After those nine years of work and refinement, Vidal was given a series of unique opportunities to cut the hair of some high-profile celebrities, namely, the fashion icon, Mary Quant; actress, Nancy Kwan; and model, Grace Coddington, who was the first to wear his famous Five-point cut. Sassoon’s cuts were renowned for their sharp angles, geometric form, and low-maintenance. His notoriety quickly propelled him to celebrity status, rapidly becoming a true master and innovator of his time. 

“We had to find a way to create angles and shape to the living bone structure, as architects had done with great cities,” he said, and as he grew more popular, his revolutionary style grew more in demand. It became a staple in the hair industry. Vidal Sassoon paved the way for the celebrity hairstylist. However, aside from his overwhelming popularity, he also became a prominent educator, opening academies across the globe, paving the way for a new generation of practitioners. 

To cover the breadth and depth of Sassoon’s accomplishments would take too many words in this context, but the lesson from his life still remains fascinating. How a young minority boy from a poor town in England applied himself to a craft for the better part of a decade, and through his love of architecture, revolutionized an industry, creating an empire and legacy that is still remembered today. Let’s conclude with the words of Sassoon’s former pupil and business partner, Paul Mitchell; as far as he is concerned, Sassoon was, “the most famous hairstylist in the history of the world.”