Ready, Steady, Go!: Swinging London and the Invention of Cool. Shawn Levy
“professional”. And what they did to Jean was amazing: they tried to turn her into a kind of doll – stiff hair, too much make-up, over-production. By the time they were finished, it wasn’t really Jean anymore. And it had nothing to do with what we were doing in London at the time, which was much more natural.’
So they became a revolution of two. For the next couple of years – be it in London, New York, Paris or the countryside – Bailey and Shrimpton worked almost exclusively together and, until the rise of the Beatles, were the most glittering jewels in the diadem of the New Aristocracy, the set of young pretties and go-getters whose rise and adventures filled the newspapers and the dreams of young strivers in the East End, South London and the hinterlands.
Bailey, blessed by the money, access and haughty remove his status afforded him, nonetheless harboured a resentful attitude towards the glittery cage in which he believed success had trapped him, and he became frankly bristly when asked about the clichéd image of his life: ‘The whole thing about the East End fashion photographer is that it is perfect for cheap journalism. They always have me talking like a cockney but I don’t think I speak particularly cockney. And in fact I’ve never been out with girls who wear white boots. And I’ve never called a woman a bird.’
The World Was Full of Chancers
For as long as there’s been a Bond Street in Mayfair, it’s been a fashionable place to shop, be pampered, live and stroll. Shirtmakers and silversmiths, stamp dealers and hosiers, auction houses, art galleries, antique dealers and tobacconists – always the finest and most expensive, always catering to upper-class money. It’s a place where the fictional Clarissa Dalloway saw Queen Victoria buying flowers, where both the real Admiral Nelson and his fictitious inheritor Horatio Horn-blower lived, where shops have been in business – and serving royalty – for centuries.
Hardly the setting for a revolution, in short, and yet, in 1963, in a beauty salon at number 171, that was exactly what was going on. Sitting having her hair done was Mary Quant, the Chelsea fashion wizard and madcap. Behind, beside, above and around her buzzed Vidal Sassoon, owner and eponym of the establishment, working away with short scissors – five-inchers, which let him get closer to the hair, he felt – and applying a theory he’d been developing about haircutting to Quant’s already famous Buster Brown bangs.
A few days earlier, Quant had asked Sassoon to come up with something new for the hair of the models who would present her latest fashion line in an upcoming show. Sassoon had blurted, 'You could cut the whole damn lot off.’
Quant laughed, but he was serious. ‘I’m going to cut the hair like you cut material,’ he explained. ‘No fuss. No ornamentation. Just a neat, clean, swinging line.’
The idea had come to Sassoon through his study of architecture, particularly the works of the Bauhaus, pioneers of the International style of rigorously straight, clean lines that gave even massive skyscrapers an affecting lightness. ‘I dreamt hair in geometry,’ he remembered, ‘squares, triangles, oblongs and trapezoids.’ More specifically, he had intuited that it was possible to cut a woman’s hair so that it would hold a shape without recourse to gels, chemicals or applied heat, so that its shape would persist because of its structure, as it were, rather than the way in which it had been sculpted. ‘It is not the hemline but the outline that matters,’ he reckoned. He had been working gradually towards the ideal form of his vision; his 1960 design known as ‘the Shape’ came close. But he hadn’t ever really applied his theory to its fullest extent: what he wanted to do was crop the models’ hair into a squared-off shape of straight lines, short back and long sides – a modern approximation of a flapper’s bob but without any fixatives or styling: a bob cut.
Quant was excited by the prospect and said he should go ahead and use it for her upcoming show. However, Sassoon pointed out that it was only an idea – he’d try it out first on an experimental subject.
‘It’ll work,’ she declared, ‘and I’ll be your guinea pig, so what the hell.’
And so she sat, and when it was over she was delighted, insisting that the girls in the fashion première have their hair done just the same way. On the morning of the show, Sassoon cut all the models’ hair just as he had Quant’s – and then covered them up in scarves so as to deploy the new look as a surprise on the catwalk.
At the show, the haircut was even more of a sensation than the clothes. A Vogue editor rhapsodised, ‘At last hair is going to look hair again,’ and went in for the cut herself. An editor at the Sunday Times lashed out against the look in print. David Bailey, of all people, sided with the antis, arguing with Sassoon heatedly as Sassoon recalled years later:
‘Well, at least, Bailey, I’ve made some sort of a mark!’
‘Is that what you call it? It looks more like a bloody scar to me!’
But the thing had grown beyond the bounds of critique. A few weeks after its début, the new haircut, which Sassoon still called the Bob but which was becoming known in the business as ‘the Quant’, received an enormous boost when the actress Nancy Kwan, preparing to shoot The Wild Affair (in clothes designed by Quant), was brought to Sassoon’s salon for the new look. Kwan was famous for her long, thick, straight curtain of jet-black hair, but Sassoon went to work on it all the same, while the actress played chess with her manager. When it was over, she offered no commentary save a smile. A few days later, Terence Donovan was hired by Vogue to help show off the new look in both the British and American editions of the magazine. When Sassoon arrived at the photo studio to help get Kwan ready, he found her beaming: ‘I like it. Everybody likes it.’ Donovan took the photo – one of the most famous of his career – and thus began a long association with Sassoon, whose work, he felt, made a splendid subject: ‘Because the cuts were so strong they were very easy to photograph,’ he explained.
Donovan’s shot of the Bob – now also known as ‘the Kwan’ – went everywhere in the world: a real style sensation. One of those inspired by it was the French designer Emmanuelle Khanh, who flew to London for it (yes, it now became known in some places as ‘the Khanh’) and then ordered it for all the girls in her forthcoming show. The gimmick in this one was that the models would all come onto the catwalk wearing gigantic hats, then simultaneously remove them and shake their heads – astonishing the crowd of fashionistas as their new haircuts fell naturally into shape.
The ensuing publicity pushed Sassoon’s thriving business and growing reputation to unprecedented heights. There had always been celebrity crimpers around London’s posher neighbourhoods – Sassoon had worked for some, such as ‘Teasy Weasy’ Raymond, and others, such as Leonard of Mayfair, had worked for him in the near-decade that he’d been running his own salon. But none of them—not even the ones who won prizes in hairdressing competitions – had anything like the fame that was now enveloping Sassoon. He was in magazines and newspapers, both as an interview subject and as a matter of debate. Business on Bond Street increased dramatically – so impressively, in fact, that the managers of the Grosvenor House Hotel invited Sassoon to open a second salon on their premises; they’d been surreptitiously eyeing the traffic at various chic salons and observed that Sassoon’s Mondays and Thursdays were as busy as other people’s Saturdays.
And beyond even all the fame and success, Sassoon had discovered that the Bob/Quant/Kwan/Khanh had made concrete all his abstract thoughts about hair, haircutting, hair care and the new lifestyles that were sweeping London. In another few months, he would create another cut, the Five Point Cut, ‘the finest cut I have ever created, the geometric design in its purest, most classical form’.
More impressive even than this triumph – the obsessive’s realisation of his dream vision – was the totality of the achievement: Sassoon’s new vision of hair-styling changed the lives of looks-conscious women everywhere. Before Mary Quant submitted to his ministrations, women – even the most modern and chic – went to salons to have their hair dressed – permed, gelled, fried, baked and bent into shapes that enslaved them both to their coiffeur and to the people who