Grace Coddington Remembers Vidal Sassoon
By ERIC WILSON
Ms. Coddington in the five-point cut by Vidal Sassoon.
IT was around 1960, during her early days as a model and years before she became an editor at Vogue, that Grace Coddington met the famed hairstylist Vidal Sassoon. Ms. Coddington, born in Wales and not yet 20, was a hit among the hairdressers of London.
"I remember I had done a lot of hair jobs because I have quite good-quality hair," said Ms. Coddington, who is known for her bobbing red mane. "I got thrown from hairdresser to hairdresser, people like Raymond, Mr. Teasy-Weasy, and those. That was the old, traditional kind of hairdresser. And then I got sent to Vidal's salon on Bond Street, and he loved my hair.
"So I started working with him doing hair shows. We traveled to all the funny little towns all over England, where the local hairdressers did these huge hairdos, sprayed blue or green or pink, in shapes like ships with pearls on them and the most crazy things. Then on walks Vidal, with me and a couple of different models, and he starts cutting our hair on stage."
Remembering Mr. Sassoon, the hairstyling revolutionary who died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 84, Ms. Coddington described a man of impeccable intelligence and a health and exercise fanatic who shed his Cockney accent well before it was fashionable to do so. In the mid-1960s, he proposed his famous five-point cut.
"I think it was when he was planning for a Rudi Gernreich show," she said. "He was asked to do the hair for that. He was working out what kind of hair to do. He figured it out on me.
"He was key to that whole look in the early '60s, that youthquake thing in London. The cut gave you a certain freedom. You weren't chained to the salon, and you certainly didn't have to go and have it set with big rollers under a hair dryer for a couple of hours. He did it with a hand-held hair dryer, so it wasn't quite drip-dry, but it was remarkable. It was a cut so precisely worked out that, no matter which way you shook it, there was never a sort of long piece hanging over the wrong side."