It’s been a crap week for losing cool, creative people: first Beastie Boys rapper and film maker MCA, then author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, and now the legendary hairstylist, Vidal Sassoon, who sadly died yesterday at the age of 84.
Just as his collaborator Mary Quant revolutionised dressing in the ’60s, Vidal Sassoon revolutionised hairdressing.
His fresh, new approach quite literally freed women’s hair. No more sit-down-under-the-stand-up-dryer styles but more ‘wash and wear’ hair.
His low maintenance, geometric cuts were shaped to fit the faces of each of his customers. From the iconic five-point through to the sleek bob, every cut was more a work of art than a hairstyle.
Sassoon soon boasted a celebrity client list, most notably creating Mia Farrow’s signature pixie cropped style for 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby.
As Vogue Creative Director Grace Coddington, one Sassoon’s original five-point models, told the New York Times:
He didn’t create it for me, he created it on me. It was an extraordinary cut; no one has bettered it since. And it liberated everyone. You could just sort of drip-dry it and shake it.
Sassoon viewed hair as fabric that needed to be shaped. He leaves with us a legacy of global hair dressing academies and his golden hairdressing mantra:
If your client doesn’t look good, you don’t look good
We’ll let Sassoon’s scissors do the rest of the talking and leave you with our ten favourite pics of the man in action:
Vidal Sassoon, CBE – 17 January 1928 – 9 May 2012
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