I was so lucky to go to Hairdressing School in London, England in 1960. It was the grooviest time. Carnaby Street,the Music & Clubs.
I was a huge fan of the Paris Designers and Hairstylists. Those Parisians knew how to make every female look sexy, how to do back brushed bouffant updo’s, short gamine haircuts and of course the Bridget Bardot Look. Hairdressing got even more expressive in London as this fellow known as Vidal Sassoon was just starting to make his name heard. I feel most fortunate to have learned “old school” methods of hair shaping just before Sassoon.
A few years later with an ability to think, a little bit of luck and insight I was able to develop some original techniques and approach to shaping hairstyles. I realized that while many stylists start their haircuts from the nape first, that wasn’t logical (unless it was a classic all one length blunt cut). Clients look at their face for their style suitability, so common sense told me to start shaping hair at the bangs or around the face. The other thing I realized, probably influenced by Vidal, is that if you wish for the shape your cut to go back to the same place that it was carved, then it has to be shaped with gravity and the natural flow. Unfortunately today, 85% of haircutters cut the perimeter of the haircut by pulling the hair forward. When something is too easy in life, it’s probably incorrect. Some stylists even put their clients head down towards the floor to shape it, huge mistake. The other most important thing that happened for me was the day a model came into me with a mess. She had asked her stylist to cut layers which he wasn’t trained to do. He just grabbed the top third of her hair and chopped.
She ended up having a bowl on top of another blunt bowl. In tears she pleaded with me to “ do something “. I thought about it for awhile and invented a new technique by inverting layers in a gravitational line. This blended out the hard line caused by the chop.
The photos attached show the long layered haircut, notice how much hair is in the front (this hair is all lost if the cut is pulled forward), The second shot is from suggesting clients could wrap their hair up at night in rags, something that gals used to do during World War 2. The 3rd pic shows the sexy casual curls from rags.
