Someone else who was denied a career in soccer went in a very different direction. Vidal Sassoon is one of the most celebrated names in hairdressing. In the 1960s, his clients included the biggest stars and iconic models of the time, including Mary Quant, Jean Shrimpton, and Mia Farrow. His revolutionary creations included the bob, the five‐point geometric cut, and the Greek goddess style, taking over from the beehive styles of the 1950s.
When Vidal was a child in the East End of London, his father abandoned his mother. An aunt took them all in, and Vidal and four other children lived together in her two‐bedroom tenement flat. Things got so bad that eventually his mother sent Vidal and his brother to an orphanage, and it was nearly six years before she was able to get them home again. As a teenager, he had a passionate ambition be a soccer player, but his mother insisted that he apprentice as a hairdresser. She thought that would be a more secure job for him.
“I was fourteen years old,” he said, “and in England unless you were privileged, that was when you left school and started to earn a living. I was apprenticed to this wonderful man called Adolph Cohen on Whitechapel Road and what a disciplinarian he was! I was fourteen, it was 1942, and the war was on. Bombs were dropping practically every night, the Luftwaffe was giving London hell, and we still had to come in with our nails clean, our trousers pressed, and our shoes polished. Those two years with him definitely gave me the structure I needed in my life: the inconvenience of discipline.
“I took some time out after that because I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a hairdresser. I loved football so much. In the end, I suppose it was the prospect of all the pretty girls and, of course, my mother that swung it for me. At first I couldn’t get a proper job in the West End of London at a big salon like Raymond’s because I had a cockney accent. That’s the way it was in those days.”
For three years, he took voice lessons to improve how he sounded so he could get a job at one of the better salons. “I knew I had to learn how to project myself, so I got a job teaching in different salons in the evenings. I used my tips to take a bus to the West End and go to the theater. I’d catch the matinee and see great Shakespearean actors like Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud and try to copy their voices.”
He went regularly to London’s many art museums and began to educate and inspire himself with the history of painting and architecture. “I really think that was what set me on my course. I was developing my own vision for hairdressing. The shapes in my head were always geometric. I have always been working toward a bone structure so as to define a woman rather than just make her ‘pretty pretty.’ I knew hair dressing could be different, but it took a lot of work and nine years to develop the system we use in our salons.”
In 1954, he and a partner opened a very small salon on the third floor of a building in London’s fashionable Bond Street. “Bond Street was magic to me because it meant the West End. It was where I couldn’t get a job earlier. The West End meant I was going to make it. I was determined to change the way things were done or leave hairdressing. For me it wasn’t a case of bouffants and arrangements. It was about structure and how you train the eye.”
In the first week, they took in only fifty pounds, but after two years they had built the business to a point where they could move to the “right” end of Bond Street and compete with the top salons.
“London was a fascinating place in the sixties. There was this incredible energy. We were not going to do things the way our parents did. I was always looking for different ways of doing things. Everything was changing: our music, clothes, and art. So it was clear to me that there could be something different for hair.”
And then one day, something caught his eye that was to transform his vision and the whole field of hairdressing. “One Saturday, one of the guys was drying a client’s hair and just using a brush and drier without any rollers. I thought about it over the weekend, and on the Monday I asked him why he had dried her hair like that. He said he’d been in a hurry and didn’t want to wait for her to come out of the dryer. ‘Hurry or not,’ I said, ‘you’ve discovered something, and we are going to work on this.’ For us, that’s how blow drying started.”
Vidal Sassoon was to create a revolution in cutting and styling hair that changed the industry and the way that women looked around the world.
“I always had shapes in my head. I remember cutting Grace Cruddington’s hair into the ‘five point haircut’ and flying to Paris with her in 1964. I wanted to actually show it to the magazine editors. I knew we’d got something but you had to see it, see the way it moved and swung. It was all about scissors. Our motto was ‘eliminate the superfluous.’ We made pages and pages in Elle magazine. They’d been going to feature curls but they loved what we’d done. That led on to more photo sessions and tours. Then in 1965, I was invited to do a show in New York and about five newspapers covered it. They gave us the front page of the beauty section in the New York Times the following day. The papers and magazines were full of pictures of our new geometric cuts. We’d done it! We’d brought America ‘the bob.’ ”
He opened the first Sassoon school in London in 1967. Now they are all over the world. “My philosophy has always been to share knowledge. Our academy and education centers are filled with energy. That’s what helps young people to push the boundaries of their creativity. I tell them, if you have a good idea, go for it, do it your way. Take good advice, make sure it is good advice, then do it your way. We’ve been around for a long time and to me ‘longevity is a fleeting moment that lasts forever.’ ”
Vidal Sassoon created a new look and a whole new approach to fashion and style. He not only took the opportunities that he saw, he created a million more in the way he responded to them.
Perhaps the most important attitude for cultivating good fortune is a strong sense of perseverance. Many of the people in this book faced considerable constraints in finding the Element and managed to do it through sheer, dogged determination. None more so than Brad Zdanivsky.
At nineteen, Brad knew that he loved to climb. He’d been climbing trees and boulders since he was a kid and had moved on to scale some of the highest peaks in Canada. Then, while returning home from a long drive after a funeral, he fell asleep at the wheel of his car and plunged nearly two hundred feet off a cliff.
The accident left him a quadriplegic, but he remained a rock climber in his heart. Even as he waited at the bottom of the cliff for help to arrive, knowing that he couldn’t move, he recalls wondering if it were possible for a quadriplegic to climb. After eight months of rehab, he began to talk to fellow climbers about designing some kind of gear that would get him back onto a mountain. With the help of several people, including his father, he created a device with two large wheels at the top and a smaller one on the bottom. Seated in this rig, he uses a pulley system with his shoulders and thumbs that allows him to scale about a foot at a time. The technique is excruciatingly slow, but Zdanivsky’s persistence has been rewarded. Before his injury, his goal had been to climb the two‐thousand‐foot Stawamus Chief, one of the largest granite monoliths in the world. In July 2005, he reached that goal.