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Legendary Stylist Vidal Sassoon Dies at 84

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Shampoo Magnate was Israeli War Hero

Vidal Sassoon, the Jewish hairstylist who fashioned an international business juggernaut of hairdressing salons and hair care products, died last week at age 84. Sassoon was equally famous for revolutionizing women’s hairstyling with his timesaving “wash-and-go” technique. While the hair care magnate officially died at his Los Angeles home from “natural causes,” he had been diagnosed with leukemia two years ago.
With his handsome and youthful appearance, and cultured demeanor that was at odds with his working-class youth in a Jewish orphanage in London, Sassoon gained worldwide fame in the 1960’s with his salons and hairdressing schools. The social gadfly became even more popular to the average consumer by making personal appearances in television commercials for his self-named company’s shampoos and hair sprays, wherein he declared, “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.”

In the 1970s, Sassoon began to connect his hairstyling products with the public’s resurgent interest in healthy living. Together with his wife and former Vogue editor Camille Duhe, Sassoon co-wrote the bestselling book “A Year of Beauty and Health.” His influence on society as a whole was ultimately so profound that, in 1993, a career retrospective at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology featured photos of leading models and actresses wearing his simple yet glowing hair designs. “Sassoon is in the small coterie of creative individuals who have defined what it means to be modern,” Richard Martin, the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, said at that time.

From the time that he established his first hair salon in England in 1954, Sassoon was primarily focused on enabling women to style their hair along clean geometric lines, so that he could get them to cease the then-common habit of going to sleep for the night with their hair in rollers to achieve intricately layered hair. Sassoon’s methods served to counteract the ostentatious beehive style and other “mile-high” hairstyles requiring a great deal of hairspray.

In 1957, the hair design dynamo initiated a successful collaboration with British clothes designer Mary Quant. Inventing a bob style to fit Quant’s creative vision, Sassoon fashioned a look that – though tight at the nape – enabled a woman’s hair to fall in a free-flowing bohemian cascade. The “Sassoon bob” became the pre-eminent hairstyle in early-to-mid 1960’s “Swinging London” and one of the most consistently popular hairstyles of the past fifty years. Experimenting along the lines of his own template, Sassoon followed up with an asymmetrical, peek-a-boo bob and a short, closely curled design known as the “Greek goddess.”
Vidal Sassoon eventually became the personal hairstylist of choice for a number of notable high-fashion models, including the sisters Suzy Parker and Dorian Leigh; socialites such as Lee Radziwil; and actresses such as Mia Farrow, for whom he designed a singular hairstyle for her 1968 defining performance in “Rosemary’s Baby.” Expanding his business ventures to even greater heights, Sassoon realized vastly increased profits through the sale of such hair products as shampoos, protein mixtures, brushes and hand-held blow dryers. The Sassoon brand achieved over $100 million in annual sales when he sold the business line to another company in 1983. That segment of the business was subsequently taken over by Procter & Gamble, where the now legendary Sassoon was made a consultant and celebrity spokesman for his brand.
As a small child, Vidal Sassoon had to endure the pain of his father abandoning the family and leaving them in poverty, causing the youngster to have to live for seven years in an orphanage. Dropping out of school at age 14, Vidal became an apprentice to a hairdresser, affording him an early opportunity to learn the business from the bottom up.

During World War II, the teenage Sassoon joined a vigilante gang of tough young London Jews who regularly beat up supporters of the British Union of Fascists. In 1948, at age 20, Vidal took his identification with his Jewish heritage to the next level by volunteering for the Israeli defense forces and fighting in the Israeli War of Independence of 1948, an experience that left a lasting imprint on Sassoon’s developing psyche. “In Britain, I had always felt like a second-class citizen,” he revealed in 1989. “In Israel, I had found my dignity. I translated that dignity into my career. I had been a shampoo boy. . . . I decided I could be better, do better. I went to night school.”

The indefatigable Sassoon was not afraid to use his fame and success to make a benevolent impact on others. In addition to establishing a foundation that awarded scholarships to disadvantaged African Americans who desired a hairstyling career, Sassoon supported a center for the study of anti-Semitism at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. He was even bestowed with a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in 2009.

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