A new documentary about the still spry 82-year old hairdressing legend and fashion icon, Vidal Sassoon, premiered last month at the Tribeca Film Festival. Known for his asymmetric bobs and Mia Farrow’s famous cut in Rosemary’s Baby (which cost $5000!), his unorthodox styles liberated women from the beauty shop and hot rollers for good. Sassoon was the “inventor” of wash-wear hair.

British-born Sassoon was orphaned and joined the Israeli army, fighting in 1948. His revolutionary hairstyles took him to international fame and his hair care product line was sold to Procter & Gamble making him fabulously wealthy. In 2009 he was made a Commander Of The British Empire (CBE) and Sassoon performs charity work across the globe. Sassoon’s organization helped rebuild homes in New Orleans hit by Hurricane Katrina. fights anti-Semitism and offer scholarships to needy applicants to his “Harvard of hairdressing” Vidal Sassoon Academy in Santa Monica, CA. Dazed Digital recently posted an interesting interview with the famed hairdresser:

The Sixties brought some amazing revolutions in fashion, from Op Art black and white to synthetic futuristic materials and sculptural silhouettes. In London, pioneering Mary Quant embodied the ethos and mood of the Swinging Sixties; in Paris, André Courréges, Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin offered in their designs the perfect synthesis between modernist forms, geometry and architecture, while Rudi Gernreich focused on futuristic designs that emphasised angular body shapes. Inspired by what was going on around him, British-born Israeli hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, set onto revolutionising hair cutting techniques with sculpturally perfect styles.

“I wanted to shape heads as the new young fashion designers were shaping bodies. I wanted to cut hair as they cut cloth. I wanted to be in on the revolution that was simmering,” Sassoon recounted in the ‘60s in his biography ‘Sorry I Kept You Waiting, Madam’. The perfect complement to the clean-cut lines of those fashion designs arrived in 1964 with the Five-Point Geometric Cut, based on perfect geometries, the Bauhaus and architecture. Its success was followed by further asymmetrical and geometric cuts, from the Greek Goddess to the Isadora, the Firefly, the Brush, the Wedge and the Beret.

Read the interview at Dazed Digital.
 
Actress Nancy Kwan with the signature Sassoon bob she wore in the 1963 film, The Wild Affair: