Legendary hairdresser Vidal Sassoon died in May at age 84—but he won’t be forgotten any time soon. He shepherded the architectural bob into the mainstream in the 1950s and became famous for redefining femininity at the time. There were geometric cuts with clean lines, which were both daring and strikingly simple. His was a kind of hairdressing that dovetailed equally with innovation; his styles were sexy and envelope-pushing. But his artistry wasn’t just about shocking and creating the new: it was also, as he saw it, about progression. “I see people as shapes, bone structures, as animated subjects for the scissors,” Sassoon writes in a new monograph, Vidal Sassoon: How One Man Changed the World With a Pair of Scissors, out by Rizzoli this month. “How lucky to be able to touch a human being, to be exhilarated by a craft that is constantly changing, to have that substance which grows from the human form that you can mold to create spontaneous fashion, and yet bring out the individuality. How lucky I have been to be involved in the poetry of change.” Sassoon was an early champion of several models, among them mod icon Mary Quant and Grace Coddington, who is now the creative director of Vogue. “I think it’s a style, a cut, an approach to hair that truly revolutionized not just hair but fashion and so many things. You could be upside-down and your hair still looked perfect. It was fun,” she wrote in the film’s introduction. “He created a revolution, a whole new freedom for women.”
Courtesy Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.
