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 Keynote Speaker
"A Lifetime of Lessons Learned"
“There's a name that's so pervasive worldwide that it ranks up there with Coca-Cola, Levi's and McDonald's. It's a name so integral to contemporary culture that it merits four Trivial Pursuit questions and a listing in the Harper/Collins' English Dictionary. That name is Vidal Sassoon.”
-- Claire Crazier
OK! Magazine, London, March, 1994
The facts of Vidal Sassoon's life do not need embellishment for they are incredible just as they are. The journey from his birth in 1928 to the position he occupies today is a success story of striking proportions. Vidal Sassoon grew up in a London ghetto in a flat, or apartment, above a bakery. At age five, as The Great Depression exacted its toll world wide, his father left the family. Vidal and his three year old brother were placed in a Jewish orphanage, where they remained for six years. Only when his mother remarried could the family reunite under one roof. But the luxury of school was something they could not afford. Vidal, at age 14, went looking for work. His mother wanted him to learn a trade - and in a dream envisioned Vidal in a hairdressers' salon. Taking it as an omen, she convinced a reluctant Vidal to go with her to Cohen's Beauty and Barber Shop in the East End. The story of how Vidal's good manners persuaded Professor Cohen to hire the young man as an apprentice has been recounted dozens of times, and for good reason. Here was an unschooled boy, barely a teenager, with no prior experience and a thick Cockney accent whose parents couldn't afford the normal apprentice fee. Despite these drawbacks, Vidal was hired.
For the next six years, working his way into becoming a hairdresser, Vidal performed all the menial tasks of an apprentice, always trying to learn more about the business and working diligently to rid himself of his accent. “In those days, you couldn't get hired in the more fashionable West End with an 'Artful Dodger' accent like mine”, Vidal stated, “so I went to the theatre week after week to hear English the way it was meant to be spoken”.
At night, the still-teenage Vidal worked for Zionist and anti-Fascist organizations. “My mother was very active in these political movements”, Vidal said, “so I met some extraordinary people. Working for these causes was made easier because of the passion I felt about these issues.” This passion led him to fight in Israel 's War of Independence after the partition of Palestine in 1948. So, at 20, he was serving in the Palmach, one of the military units that eventually merged to become the Israeli Defense Force, and fought for a year in the Negev Desert campaign.
Returning to Britain because his family again needed him economically, Vidal was determined to achieve success in the hairdressing business. At the age of 26, he was fortunate in finding backers who put up the money for his first salon, a small third floor walk-up on Bond Street in Mayfair. “We didn't have a lot of space”, Vidal admits, “customers often had to wait out in the hall”. But customers came. His search for new ways to cut hair, ways that reflected his revolutionary ideas about style, attracted people who were themselves interested more in meritocracy than in the old British aristocracy.
Vidal's search for new techniques wasn't easy: “It took nine years of cutting hair, always trying to find ways to make the cuts simple yet elegant, striking to the eye but somehow natural”, Vidal said. “The process involved thinking of hair styling as an extension of someone's total appearance, involving bone structure, facial physiognomy, and geometry of shape.”
In 1958, with the support of still more backers, Vidal opened his first large Bond Street Salon. And in the 1960's, there was an explosion of creative energy from Vidal and his wonderful artistic team that included Roger Thompson and Christopher Brooker, who developed into extraordinary artistic directors, and Laurance Taylor and Annie Humphreys, who created magical colors to enhance the look. London was the happening place: The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Mary Quant's designs, the miniskirt, Carnaby Street , fashion photographers David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy, and Vidal Sassoon's unique cuts. Over the next three decades, the world came to Vidal for his unique vision. Vidal and his team worked Paris, Milan, New York, London, and Tokyo for fashion designers, movies stars (his “$5,000 haircut” of Mia Farrow on the set of “Rosemary's Baby” made headlines all over the world), and people from all walks of life turned to the method of cutting and hair care which became known as Sassooning. The idea of men and women being able to wash and dry their hair daily, without having to resort to gallons of hairspray or another trip to the hair salon is only accepted now because of the pioneering effort of Vidal Sassoon. His “wash and wear hair” changed personal style forever.
Today, there are numerous marks of achievement surrounding Vidal Sassoon. More than one million hairdressers have trained in his European and North American Academies. There are Vidal Sassoon Salons, Schools and Educational Centers around the globe, and Vidal takes great pride that Tim Hartley and his artistic team continue to excel with standards of excellence and creativity admired by all. He has authored or co-authored two best-selling books, Sorry I Kept You Waiting Madam (G.T. Putnam Publishing) and A Year of Beauty and Health (Simon & Schuster). He has appeared as a guest or became the guest-host on literally hundreds of television shows. He was the subject of television specials and profiles. He was the star of his own daily TV show, Your New Day for two seasons in the early 1980's.
The charities and educational institutions to which Vidal has given his time and energy to help raise funding or achieve their goals stretch from one end of the globe to the other and include everything from mounting a ballet for the Dance Theatre of Harlem to the establishment of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism and Related Bigotries at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. On June 13, 1994, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem conferred on Mr. Vidal Sassoon, the degree of “Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa”.
A multi-media traveling presentation entitled the Vidal Sassoon 50th Anniversary Exhibition has toured the world, appearing at New York 's Fashion Institute of Technology, the Polish Institute of Architects, the Portuguese National Institute of Art, Germany's Bauhaus Museum, London, Paris and other sites.
Up until just recently, for over 10 years Vidal and his beautiful wife, Ronnie, worked traveling the world promoting Procter & Gamble. Vidal has four children and seven grandchildren.
As one of his co-workers stated, “Vidal has changed the way the whole world looks”. As Gerald Battle-Welch and Luca P. Marigetti put it in their essay entitled Vidal Sassoon and the Bauhaus, “What remains truly remarkable is the fact that most of us today, whether we realize it or not, are wearing hairstyles derived from Vidal's Wash & Wear revolution.”
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