Aroundtown MEETS Early ‘70s
Late ‘60s: WIG WORK
Late ‘60s “Back in Barnsley, she brought with ”
her Sassoon’s concept of radical bobbed and cropped hair such as the one-eyed girl, asymmetric Isadora, pixie cut and Greek goddess.
his pioneering techniques in the Hairdressers Journal and sent a letter applauding him on his originality. He wrote back to thank Denise for her praise, having received very few compliments for his work, and invited her to join him at his London salon as an apprentice.
But Denise had a fledgling salon and four-year-old son Stephen to think about. She couldn’t just up and leave for two years. Plus, how would she pay for the indentured apprenticeship fees from one of the world’s finest stylists.
This was starting to mirror her route into hairdressing all those years before. Before the mid-1970s, there was no formal route into a trade like hairdressing and you’d instead pay a fee to a master craftsman to teach you all they
knew. That option was financially unavailable to Denise’s parents – they had another two young sons to consider – so she left school at 14 and began unpaid work in a salon to pick up any tips and tricks she could.
But this opportunity with Sassoon was one nobody could afford to turn down. Leaving Stephen with family, she went to London for three months where she worked in the salon, again unpaid, sweeping floors, shampooing clients and making tea and sandwiches in return for night-time tutoring from the man himself. Back in Barnsley, she brought with her Sassoon’s concept of radical bobbed and cropped hair such as the one-eyed girl, asymmetric Isadora, pixie cut and Greek goddess. “People said it would never work.
Ladies wouldn’t walk around looking like boys with their short hair. The UK wasn’t ahead of the game at that time compared to other European countries. But I knew that moving away from styling and teasing hair to precision cutting was literally going to be cutting edge,” she says.
Denise was resolute and defiant, with a no surrender attitude and a single-minded vision. Today’s hairdressing industry is very much customer centric. But back then, ‘Sit down and you’ll have what I say’ was her motto. Her salon became one of the first in Yorkshire – and indeed the country – to pull away from tradition. Nobody else within the vicinity offered what they did at Denise’s; the only places you could get a Sassoon-esque cut were London, Edinburgh and Darfield. And the skill on show didn’t come cheap. A haircut was £5 which, considering the weekly wage in Barnsley averaged around £9, was incredibly bold.
It took time for attitudes in Barnsley to shift, and business nosedived for a while as they inevitably do with any trend. But
the unyielding approach to hair at Denise’s liberated women from the tyranny of bedtime rollers and towering beehives, shifting the focus to wash and wear styles that had become synonymous with 1960s fashion.
Even the men wanted to
benefit from this modern way of hairdressing.
“Because of how it was cut, ladies’ hair behaved so well without lacquer or product and their husbands couldn’t understand why theirs didn’t. But there were no unisex salons until the late ‘60s and heaven forbid a miner be seen going into a woman’s salon for his hair doing. “We used to put towels up at the windows and they’d come through the back door for clandestine trips to the salon at night. There was a barber shop next door, but they preferred what we did.” Two of Denise’s main goals in life were to sustain both her family and education, and both happened in unison. She never stopped learning new techniques or let her style become stale and old hat, knowing that the only way she could
‘90s
‘80s: WITH VIDAL SASSOON
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