‘During that year in the Negev,’ Sassoon reflected, ‘I developed a sense of self that I’d never had before.’ But back home, he found himself drifting from job to job, not entirely sure he was following the right path. He was hired at a salon on the Edgware Road, where he became interested in the world of competitive hairstyling – designing new looks which were executed and judged tournament-style. He moved on to a smarter salon on Albermarle Street – Mayfair proper – and then thought about going to Paris to study and work. Finally he surfaced, through connections, at Raymond’s in Grafton Street, the most prestigious salon in Britain.
Raymond, also known as ‘Teasy Weasy’, was a grand master of theatricality and quasi-celebrity, a man who breezed camply into a room and air-kissed and tutt-tutted and charmed, if you were charmed by that sort of thing – a professional character (and, by the way, a fine judge of horseflesh, who owned a successful stable for decades). But he was also a master hairdresser, innovative, energetic and encouraging to his young staff, including Sassoon. After a few successful months, Raymond offered him the opportunity to run a salon that was soon to open in Cardiff. Sassoon had confided to his boss that he wanted to open his own shop and he liked the look of the new set-up in Cardiff, but he wanted some input and, more, recognition: ‘How about calling it Vidal Sassoon at Raymond’s,’ he asked. No dice. ‘How about publicity, then? I’d like my name mentioned on all photographs taken.’ Not likely. Ah, well: they parted on friendly terms.
Which was fine with Sassoon, whose ambition had come to the attention of a client who offered to help him fund a new venture. When the meeting came, Sassoon had his pitch ready: ‘In most salons, the client tells the hairdresser what she wants and he gives it to her, no matter how hideous, how ludicrous the result. In my salon they will get what I think is right for them. If they don’t want it, they can take their business elsewhere. In some salons the smarm is all-important—the “yes-madam”-ing and “no-madam”-ing, the bowing and scraping. In mine, clients will get simple, downtown politeness. We’re not going to waste our breath on compliments that cost nothing and mostly mean nothing. We’re going to put all our energies into producing great work. There’s going to be no stuffiness, no cathedral atmosphere, no plush-lined hush. We’re going to have cool, cool jazz and fabulous classical music, Mahler and Sibelius, playing in the background. Those who don’t like it can find a morgue of their choice.’
Most importantly, he had a financial plan. He would keep costs down – he himself would work for a salary – and his brother, Ivor, now a qualified accountant, would see to the money. The financiers agreed, and in mid-’54 Sassoon opened his first salon in third-floor premises above a shoe store and a photo studio at 108 Bond Street.
It was cramped – with room for only twenty bodies at a time and a lift that held only three at most (and they’d better be on friendly terms, at that) – and funky for the neighbourhood. Sassoon ran it true to his word, refusing to follow the ‘Madam-knows-best’ dictates of wealthy women who’d occasionally wander in, ask for some antiquated look or treatment and then leave in a huff, their hair untouched.
Slowly, the salon’s reputation for quality work and a relaxed new feel spread. Business – and staff numbers – grew. Sassoon hired Peter Laurence Taylor, a master tinter and lifestyle experimentalist – a proto-hippie whose wardrobe was a source of daily amused scandal among both employees and customers. He hired Leonard Lewis, another Shepherd’s Bush Jewish boy with a yen for the grand life; later on, after disagreeing with Sassoon over technique, he would leave and become Leonard of Mayfair, almost as famous as his old boss. And Sassoon hired Nigel Davies, another clothes horse, this time from North London, who called himself Mr Christian. Davies wasn’t at all serious about hair – or, in fact, about much else besides looking sharp, getting paid and getting laid. He insulted customers and disappeared for knee-tremblers in the lift and generally drove Sassoon mad. Sassoon finally sacked him in a fury: ‘Out – and stay out! Never let me see you in this salon again!’ Davies grinned: ‘Blimey, would you listen to old God, going on!’ But leave he did, only returning after several years had passed and he had renamed himself Justin de Villeneuve and discovered Twiggy.
These colourful characters – plus an assortment of clients from the theatre and jazz circles in which Sassoon had begun to run – gave the salon a hot name. Nevertheless it wasn’t making enough money to satisfy the investors, who had hoped to compete with the stuffy sort of Mayfair salons that Sassoon was revolting against. So he bought out his backers and sought new capital. ‘There were many times,’ he remembered, ‘when you walked into the bank and said, “I need. Please.” It was not easy. Once London became it, then, of course, it became much easier. Then the City wanted to invest in you and all kinds of people were after you.’ When the lease became available on a large, old-school salon at 171 New Bond Street, another backer emerged, a brassy Australian named Charles Prévost. Maybe because he was a visionary, maybe because he wanted to meet girls, Prévost gave Sassoon £40,000 to redecorate and open the place. Sassoon hired the celebrated society interior decorator David Hicks to apply his hand to all four floors – which he did up in stark and airy black and white. In April 1959, the new salon opened.
The change in location – just a few streets – wasn’t nearly as important as the timing. Where just a few years earlier Sassoon had to dig up old friends who’d tasted fame to give his shop a bit of chic cachet, now his salon was a destination for celebrities, well-to-do ladies and others feeling the flush of never-had-it-so-good prosperity. Women who were wearing clothes made by Mary Quant started to come in for the loose new style Sassoon had designed – the Shape. Some of the adventuresome London men who’d been leaning toward new looks came in, including young acting stars Peter Sellers, Peter O’Toole, Christopher Plummer, Terence Stamp. (In recruiting such customers, Sassoon was no doubt aided by the fact that he was an East End boy himself, with a known reputation as both a scrapper and a skirt-chaser; by the time he opened his second salon, in fact, he already had one marriage behind him and another on the horizon.)
Energised by what was going on around him, Sassoon began sparking ideas: hand-held blow-dryers were used to create body in hair and eliminate the use of big space helmet dryers; conditioners and other treatments were created to nurture the hair of clients who’d been subjected to years of harsh chemicals, gels and sprays; electrically heated rollers helped speed up setting time. Sassoon became such a sensation that Clairol, the American hair product company, sent him around the US in 1960 on a barnstorming demonstration tour; he followed up with a similar trip through the UK.
Yet, for all this success, he was still haunted by his ideas of hair sculpted geometrically and freed from all the encumbrances that many of even his newest styles still required. He pursued studies of shapes and forms, even sitting down with architect Philip Johnson to show him some sketches. He knew there was another way; he could feel it simmering under his feet.
And then in 1963 Mary Quant showed up and told him she wanted something new for her girls.
Kaboom.
Quant had that kind of power – indeed, she had virtually invented it. She had single-handedly reinvigorated the idea of modern British fashion with designs that bubbled up out of her head and into the window of a boutique on the King’s Road in Chelsea, a thoroughfare which, though a ten-minute taxi ride from Piccadilly, was thought of by most Londoners as the heart of some quaint riverside village.
The impetus to Quant’s starting a revolution in quiet, arty Chelsea was her marriage to Alexander Plunket-Greene, one of the very first old-family Englishmen in whom the spirit of the ‘60s blossomed. Born into a line of English eccentrics, who included Paul Robeson, Bertrand Russell and Evelyn Waugh among its