Hairstylist Vidal Sassoon Dies at 84

Legendary hairstylist Vidal Sassoon died yesterday in L.A. of natural causes, with his family members at his side. In his illustrious lifetime he had four wives and four children and achieved celebrity status. Sassoon was the first to create a movement towards clean, sculptured, sophististicated haircuts. Vidal’s “Sassoon haircuts” pushed the bar towards hair as an art form while at the same time putting hairstylists on the celebrity map, setting the stage for Barbara Streisand hooking up with hair stylist/movie director Jon Peters and hit films like Shampoo. Most significantly, Vidal Sassoon unleashed a new willingness to appreciate and pay the high price for a good haircut. This includes myself: my hairstylist Ron Lee is a former highly experienced Vidal Sassoon hairstylist.

“If I was going to be in hairdressing, I wanted to change things. I wanted to eliminate the superfluous and get down to the basic angles of cut and shape.”

Remember when women went from the tortured hairdos of the ’50s to the straight-haired hippy look of the ’60s? It was Vidal Sassoon, who opened his first Vidal Sassoon salon in 1954, that changed our relationship with hair and created the no-nonsense, elegant look. By the ’70s, his salons were incredibly popular, his products were featured in fashion magazines, and women were clamoring for his cuts.

My mom, a big Sassoon fan, taught me the value of a good haircut. Although we lived in Michigan, she would book us at a Vidal Sassoon salon anytime we traveled to a big city, be it NYC, Chicago, Toronto, or Miami. I was a lucky child to have gotten many Sassoon cuts at so young an age. Before Vidal Sassoon, out-of-town haircuts were not common. Yet in the 1960s, before Vidal opened any of his salons in the U.S., women were known to fly all the way to London to get one of his cuts. Vidal may be gone, but his influence on our relationship with our hair will remain for generations to come.

Related articles

• Famed Hair Stylist Vidal Sassoon Dies (myfoxdc.com)
• Remembering Vidal Sassoon (nytimes.com)
• Hairstylist Vidal Sassoon dies (bbc.co.uk)