Hair + Architecture

 
Vidal Sassoon has been deemed an artist, a craftsman, and a rock star. He marched on the battlefield of hairstyling, scissors in hand, and became a liberator of women against the oppressive tyranny of the 1950's salon.


In the recent documentary chronicling Sassoon's life, he named Bauhaus architecture as a main inspiring force throughout the course of his distinguished career. As both the typology and topology of architecture was rapidly changing with the emergence of the Bauhaus and the Modernist dictum, Sassoon sought this same transformation in hair-styling. Where hair was not about tight curls, or harsh routines but more about the 'wash and wear' functionality to fit the ever changing livelihood of the  Modern (with a capital M) woman. The belief that hair was not simply about beauty, but more about geometry, angles, and structure unique to the head to which it sat upon, is the true essence that brought Sassoon's correlation between architecture and hairstyling to life. Bauhaus architects sought to revolutionize buildings and infrastructure through a pedestaling of function and program as a means of generating geometric form specific to site. Sassoon's pioneering styles were straight, short and cut into uneven shapes to express the individual bone structure. The revolution occurring in the built world was both paralleled and strengthened by what Sassoon created in not only hair-styling but life-styling.

   Vidal Sassoon Bob.                                                      Architetural Study, Johannes Intan.

Bob Variation                             Marzgefallenen-Denkmal, Germany. Walter Gropius.                           

        Bob Variation.                               Seagrams Building, New York. Mies Van Der Rohe.