THE NEW BOND STREET DEMOCRAT

See Also: CARNABY STREET; FASCISM Anti-Fascism; HAIR Hairdressing

Vidal Sassoon was born to a Jewish couple who lived in the East End. The marriage collapsed. His mother placed him and his brother in the Spanish & Portuguese Jews Orphanage, which was located in Maida Vale. Six years later, she re-wed. She then reclaimed her sons.

When Sassoon was aged fourteen, he wanted to become a soccer player. However, his mother decided that he should be apprenticed to a ladies hairdresser. She took him to Adolph Cohen's shop on the Whitechapel Road. There she addressed Mr Cohen about the possibility. He replied that he was sorry but he was not planning to take on an apprentice. The Sassoons started to leave the premises. The hairdresser noticed that the youth went to the door to hold it open so that his mother could leave. This instance of courtesy prompted the barber to instantly change his mind. He declared that he would take him on gratis.

Sassoon was keen to improve his lot. On his Wednesday half-days off, if he had accumulated enough tips, he would take a bus to the West End. There, he would pay 2s. so that he could stand at the back of a theatre while a play was being performed. Subsequently, he would try to recreate the actors voices. He did this in order to try to iron out his Cockney accent.

After the war there was a resurgence of Fascist activity in London. Sassoon became the youngest member of the 43 Group, a band that was composed principally of Jewish ex-servicemen and women who used physical means to oppose the racialists. During this time the apprentice often carried a cosh or a razor blade with him. Upon one occasion he was the victim of a beating that left his face bruised and cut. On the following day, one of his customers at Mr Cohen's asked him what had happened to him. He replied Nothing much. I just fell over a hairpin.

Sassoon travelled to Israel. There, he fought in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. During a seventeen-day-long defence of a hill top near Gaza, his unit lost 40% of its members. Family responsibilities prompted him to return to London and hair cutting. He took a position in the West End salon of Raymond Mr Teasy-Weasy Bessone, whom he credited with truly teaching him his craft.

At the time, the prevailing practice for hairdressers was to cut their clients hair into styles that required frequent maintenance. This locked the latter into returning to the formers salons. Sassoon's time in the new, egalitarian Israeli state had had a profound impact upon his worldview. Drawing upon his experience of the country, Sassoon decided that he wanted to try to democratise haircare. He gave himself five years in which to have some form of impact.

In 1954 the snipper opened his own establishment on New Bond Street. The premises were a third-floor walk-up. Four years later he moved into larger ones that were at street-level. His male clients came to include actors such as Peter O Toole and Terence Stamp.

As the popularity of beehives and bouffant hair-dos declined so Sassoon began to emerge as a public figure. He took to using razor-sharp angles to accentuate his clients cheekbones. His work started to be featured in fashion magazines. In 1963 he fused the bob of the 1920s, that had been sported by the likes of the American silent movie actress Louise Brooks, with elements of Bauhaus design to create his own five-point variant of the hairstyle.₁ This required minimal upkeep and could be maintained by women attending his salon once every six weeks rather than weekly. It came to be sported by the likes of the clothes designers Jean Muir and Mary Quant,² the pop singer Cilla Black, and the models Grace Coddington and Peggy Moffitt, who were icons of the decade. The snipper became one of the leading figures of Swinging London.

Location: Spanish & Portuguese Jews Orphanage, 2 Ashworth Road, Maida Vale, W9 1JY

108 New Bond Street, W1S 1EF. Sassoon's initial salon. (blue, turquoise)

171 New Bond Street, W1S 4RD (red, turquoise)

Cohen s Beauty & Barber Shop, 101 Whitechapel Road, E1 1DT (blue, red)

Website: www.sassoon.com (Salons) www.vidalsassoon.com (Haircare brands) http://sicsa.huji.ac.il (The Vidal Sassoon Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

¹. While Sassoon had been in Israel, he had given serious consideration to training to become an architect.

². On the first occasion that Sassoon had cut Quant's hair he had nicked one of ears with his scissors. She bled profusely. However, her automatic response was to giggle. She became a loyal client.

David Backhouse 2024