1928–2012 
HAIR STYLIST ENGLAND AND UNITED STATES
Swinging London—which dominated many facets of popular culture in the 1960s with Beatlemania, miniskirts, bell-bottoms, etc.—was the scene of one of the truly revolutionary developments in modern hair styling, the Vidal Sassoon haircut.
—FRANK W. HOFFMAN, PHD, AND WILLIAM G. BAILEY, MA, FASHION WRITERS
Listen carefully, Vidal.” The teenage boy’s mother shook him awake. Then she told him all about the dream she’d just had—how she’d seen an older version of him working in a barber shop and making enough money never to have to live in poverty again.
“Mum, that’s ridiculous,” Vidal protested. At fourteen, he didn’t want to cut or style hair. It was 1942, and World War II was raging throughout Europe. Vidal Sassoon wanted to be a politician so he could fight against Fascism and Nazism for the safety and fair treatment of Jews and other minorities. He was Jewish, and it was terrifying to watch how brutally the Jews were being treated across the continent. But his mother told him not to argue. She signed him up to apprentice with Adolph Cohen, the hairdresser in the East End of London.
Vidal Sassoon was born in 1928 in West London, England, to a Jewish mother from Spain. Over the course of his life, Vidal became incredibly close to his mother, but his youth was fraught with hardship. His father left the family when Vidal was only three, and his mother could no longer afford to pay rent on the small apartment she lived in with Vidal and her youngest son, Ivor. She packed up and moved the boys with her to live with her sister. Between the two families, seven people shared the small apartment, and they were constantly struggling for money. After two years with five growing children, they just couldn’t all fit in the same rooms anymore. But Vidal’s mother still didn’t have enough money to rent her own apartment for her family. She turned to the church, specifically the church orphanage, to help her.
At five years old, Vidal went to live at the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Orphanage. Ivor followed shortly after. The first night in the orphanage, Vidal curled up into a ball on his bed, and all the other boys left him alone. They knew the sadness he felt because they had felt it too. Vidal and Ivor lived in the orphanage for almost seven years. They made friends there, but they were hungry most of the time, and their mother was only allowed to visit once a month. More than anything, Vidal longed to live with his family again.
Then one day his wish came true. His mother had remarried, and the family now had enough money for Vidal and Ivor to move home. That’s when his mom had the dream that would shape Vidal’s future.
At Cohen’s salon, Vidal learned how to cut and style hair. He mostly worked with women, and the common practice of the time was for ladies to come to the salon once a week to have their hair curled and styled, then dried under the hair-drying hoods, and sprayed with so much hair spray, it would barely move until their appointment the following week. And the salons were stuffy. Stylists were expected to be silent so the customers could relax while they quietly read their magazines and waited for their hair to be done. Vidal did what he had to in order to make his boss and customers happy, but he was not excited about the work.
After the war, Vidal joined the 43 Group. These boys went out every night and fought with the Blackshirts, a fascist gang in London. Even though Fascism and the racism it preached were technically defeated in World War II, many people still supported it and acted on it. Vidal believed such discrimination was wrong, so he resisted it. He’d often come to work with black eyes or other minor injuries from his skirmishes the night before, and he’d have to come up with a vague excuse, like slipping on a hair pin, to explain.
Vidal was drafted into the British army, but he went AWOL after an officer insulted his Jewish heritage. A firm believer in racial equality, Vidal considered leaving the army a protest.
Then in 1947 the United Nations voted for Israel to be its own state, a safe place for Jews. Vidal went to Israel as a volunteer to help defend it from attackers. But when his mother sent a telegram that his stepfather had suffered a heart attack and Vidal was needed at home, he left the cause in others’ hands.
Vidal never stopped supporting the fight for equality and the Jews’ right to inhabit Israel, but when he returned to London, his career really began. For a long time, he’d wanted to break out of the poor neighborhoods of London, but he knew that if he went to a wealthier part of the city, his accent would give him away. To overcome that, he’d been going to the theater and practicing what he called a posh accent for years, and he thought he finally had it down. He set up a salon on Bond Street and hoped to fit in with his new neighbors. It worked! Everybody loved him, and they let him experiment on their hair with new cuts and styles.
By the sixties, Vidal Sassoon was known for his practical approach to hairstyling. He knew women didn’t really want to come to the salon every week and then spend the next seven days with a stiff ’do. So he cut their hair so it could relax—and not be varnished with chemicals—to look good. And he was just in time too. Those were the days of The Beatles and bell-bottoms. Nobody wanted their mother’s hairdo!
That’s exactly the reason why fashion designer Mary Quant went to Vidal in 1963 when she needed new haircuts for all of her models for an upcoming fashion show. The new clothing design featured high collars, and the models’ long hair covered them up. But they definitely didn’t want the typical short hair styles like everyone else was doing. They wanted something new, trendy, and fun.
Vidal gave his haircuts names, just like an artist names his sculptures. Some of his most famous designs were called Eye-Eye and the Curly Geometric.
Vidal fulfilled the order perfectly. He came up with asymmetrical cuts, with the hair chin-length on one side and shorter on the other, and the five-point cut, which formed two points in front of the ears and three more points at the nape of the neck. The fashion world loved Vidal’s creations, and soon he was dubbed the founder of modern hairdressing.
Women all over England, the rest of Europe, and even America began wearing their hair in Vidal’s styles. With that, Vidal soon set up more salons in England and then expanded to America. And he redefined salons from being quiet and stuffy, like where he had apprenticed, to being loud, social, and fun. He played rock music, and his stylists wore trendy clothes, flinging their blow dryers from their belts as if they were gunslingers in the Wild West. It seemed everyone in the world wanted to go to a Vidal Sassoon salon.
Today, Vidal Sassoon Hair Academies teach aspiring hair stylists in London and Santa Monica, California. Sassoon salons can be found all over the United Kingdom, America, Canada, and Germany, and a whole line of hair care products features Vidal’s name. Vidal retired in 2004, but he devoted much of his time to supporting racial equality. In 1982 he started the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at Hebrew University in Israel, where students study the phenomenon of racism against Jews and how it affects the world. He lived in Los Angeles and devoted his time and money to similar causes until his death in 2012.