Hairdresser-Fashion Designer

Hairdressers have always been in the forefront of fashion. Even more so in high-fashion ladies hairdressing, with their celebrity and regal clients who demanded the best in hairdressing style.

Those who specialise in a specific area of fashion and design are known as hairdresser-fashion designers, and it is they who create the models which other hairdressers use as their inspiration when creating new styles. A professional hairdresser-fashion designer will have an advanced knowledge of the history of fashion, art and beauty. When creating a new hairstyle, the fashion designer will take into account the client’s facial features and personal characteristics.

A fashion designer will often spend a significant amount of time in training and will learn a variety of techniques. For example, he or she will be taught how to work with different types of hair and how to make the most of the natural attributes of the hair in order to create a specific look. Fashion designers must also have excellent taste, and they will strive to instill this taste in their clients.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fashion ladies hairdressers created elaborate and highly distinctive styles for their clients. Leonard Bashor describes how he once created a headdress for Marie Antoinette, which was “a confused combination of fire-colored ribbons entangled in her looks of hair.” The fashion spread, with the hairstyle appearing on cakes and fans, as well as being featured in paintings and jewelry.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the fashion for long hair diminished and many women cut their locks to a more practical short length. This was largely due to the rise of unisex salons, but it was also because of a shift in fashion attitudes and lifestyles. The new sensibilities about hygiene encouraged women to shampoo their hair, and non-toxic dyes dissolved old taboos about changing a woman’s hair color.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, many renowned fashion hairdressers had established themselves. Vidal Sassoon had his famous London salon, Harold Leighton ran his salon at Harrods, and Gerard Saper was an international name in the world of high-fashion ladies hairdressing. Kenneth Battelle, who was based in New York, was famous for creating Jacqueline Kennedy’s signature bouffant.

As the twentieth century progressed, more and more men became regular customers of fashionable hairdressers, but it was still primarily a female profession. New trends in fashion and society saw women spending more money on their appearance, which led to more elaborate hairstyles. In the 1960s, fashion hairdressers such as Vidal Sassoon and Harold Leighton were in great demand by celebrities, and they also wrote bestselling books on how to create these styles at home.

Over the next few decades, styles would change drastically. The hippie movement saw women wearing dread-locks and sinister skinhead hairstyles as a form of protest, and blacks in America and Europe put aside their previous prejudices against chemical dyes and began to wear voluminous Afros.