Vidal Sassoon, the legendary hairdresser who sadly died yesterday, might not have been a style icon himself, as such, but he was certainly the man behind a few, including Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Quant, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton and Mia Farrow. Sassoon’s attitude to hairdressing changed women’s hair styles forever. Whilst a weekly blow-dry might be the norm for some today, gone are the days of sitting under a hood every week to create a hair style.
In 2004 Vidal Sassoon told the Chicago Tribune that he was proud to have entered the field of hairdressing, saying:
“Hairdressers are a wonderful breed. You work one-on-one with another human being and the object is to make them feel so much better and to look at themselves with a twinkle in their eye. Work on their bone structure, the colour, the cut, whatever, but when you’ve finished, you have an enormous sense of satisfaction.”
His iconic pixie and bob cuts defined a generation and are synonymous with the 60s. But they have translated into each of the decades that have followed and right into the twenty-first century these angular styles are still as popular and striking as they ever were.
His advertising slogan was “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.”
Has Vidal Sassoon influenced your style? Has a hair cut you’ve had been influenced by his iconic cuts? I know that I have been influenced by those women whose hair he’s cut, from the Twiggy/Mia Farrow pixie crop I had in my teens and the angular bob that I had cut at Fashion Week at the end of last year.
