The class took me and the other students through all of the classic haircuts. Working on models, we were instructed on what we were doing right and what we were doing wrong, and I liked that. Some people’s attitude was, “I’m paying, so how dare you criticize me,” but I wanted to know what I was doing wrong. I wanted to learn structure so, like Stephen, I could fuck it all up as a way of creating something new and bold. To me, being able to cut a perfect inverted bob was the Holy Grail because, once I mastered that, I could get really creative and become my own rock star.
I quickly realized that I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew or was as good as I thought I was. This wasn’t upsetting to me; it was motivating. When I went through the training at Stephen Pratt, I always thought I was good and people told me that I was good. But the class at Sassoon showed me that being good wasn’t good enough. Having someone critique me honestly while showing me how to improve was a wake-up call to never be complacent with yourself, your education, or where you work. Within the week, I could see an improvement in my skills and an improvement in myself.
Sassoon’s training showed me that constructive criticism is not negative because it helps you to be better. Trashing someone is not constructive. Constructive criticism is about tough love, as Americans like to call it. In my work, I always try to break people of their bad habits in order to make them better, not to leave them worse off. And the fact is, no one can be harder on me than I am on myself. I expect a lot of myself, and I’m the first one to comment when I screw something up or drop the ball. The realization that I needed to work harder to be the rock-star hairdresser I wanted to be was the biggest thing I learned at Sassoon that week. And the whole Sassoon experience made me realize that London was where I had to go to pursue my dream. I needed to get a full-time job at Sassoon and master structure so I could start to fuck it all up my own way.
As soon as Mum and I returned to Surfers Paradise, I couldn’t wait to get back to the UK. I focused on saving money over the next year so I could make the move. I was working at both of the Stephen Pratt salons, going wherever I was needed on any given day so I could bank more bucks. That is, until the Pratts sold the salon in Miami Beach. Not only was I shocked when they off-loaded that property, but I was even more stunned to discover that they passed my services onto the new owners as part of the sale, too. When I asked the Pratts why they didn’t keep me at the salon they still ran, I was told that they wanted to help the new owners hold on to as many clients as possible. They said, “We’d really like you to give it a couple of months so that the salon survives and we don’t look bad. Then after that you can always come back to Surfer’s and we’ll try to find a place for you.” In other words, they weren’t getting rid of me because I wasn’t good; they were getting rid of me because I was good.
I realize now that they had to do what they needed to do for their business, and business is business. But I felt incredibly hurt and betrayed. The whole thing really did my head in and I never rejoined them. I stayed at the new salon until I moved to London.
When I finally arrived in London, most of my savings went into a six-month class at the Sassoon Academy that basically had me doing my apprenticeship all over again within that compressed time period. I learned everything from the ground up, the Sassoon way—which was very precise, very methodical, and very structured. There was a way that one had to dress, a way one had to speak, and a way one had to section hair. Employees abided by a dress code and invariably looked incredibly well put together. When you worked for Vidal Sassoon, you needed to present yourself in a certain way and you took a lot of pride in that. When you turned up for work, you’d make sure that your hair was done and your makeup was on and your shoes were polished, and that really came from Vidal and his philosophy. It made me realize that perception is reality for a lot of people—when you put in the effort to present yourself properly, patrons do look at you differently. When clients went to Sassoon, they had an expectation of what they were going to get, and because the stylists spoke and carried themselves very professionally, the experience went beyond just getting a haircut. Those clients took us seriously as hairdressers.
There was no bullshitting about your personal life, and that suited me just fine. As a kid at school, I didn’t tell my classmates that my dad was drunk the night before and wrecked the house or that I’d spent the evening at the strip club because my mum couldn’t get a babysitter. I was used to not talking about myself, whereas many of the other stylists back in Australia certainly blabbed a lot about themselves. For me, keeping quiet was a natural fit. And Sassoon taught me that the focus really is on the person sitting in the chair, which influenced how I eventually grew my own business. Clients really don’t give a fuck about who you went out with the night before or what you did on the weekend. They care about getting a great haircut, getting excellent service, and being taken care of.
A lot of people dropped out of the six-month class because it was hard. If a haircut wasn’t perfect, we’d have to redo it until we got it exactly right—even if that meant redoing it ten times. And close wasn’t good enough. The course taught me discipline and gave me the opportunity to get a job at one of Sassoon’s Central London salons.
Although the discipline at Vidal Sassoon was great, I soon came to realize that working there wasn’t creative enough for me. Yes, the training was exceptional and it laid the groundwork for where I am today, but being so methodical didn’t leave much room for innovation. I wanted to start fucking things up and developing my own rock-star techniques as soon as possible.
It was 1988 and a lot of other hairdressers were doing really interesting things—quite a few of them were ex-Sassoon people. Toni & Guy, founded by Gaetano (Toni) and Giuseppe (Guy) Mascolo with their younger brothers Anthony and Bruno, were undoubtedly the new cool kids on the block. They were shaking up everything in the hairdressing world. They used the structure of Sassoon but deconstructed it to create looks that no one else was doing. Their photo shoots changed how people perceived—and styled—hair. So I decided to leave Sassoon because I wanted to be a part of that energy. And after I got a job as head colorist at the Toni & Guy salon in Windsor, I immediately had to go through two more weeks of training at their London academy to learn the Toni & Guy way.
When Anthony Mascolo walked into the academy, I saw that he was young, good-looking, and wildly confident. I was immediately attracted to him—not as in “I want to get in your pants,” but as in “I want to learn everything you know.” When we were introduced, he was incredibly gracious and I could tell he wanted to share what he knew with other committed and disciplined hairdressers. He soon became my mentor. Toni & Guy’s deconstructed hairstyles were a lot messier, edgier, and more textured than those of other salons, so there was a whole new world of techniques that I needed to master. Anthony essentially showed me how to take my perfect nude and rearrange its body parts on the canvas.
The whole experience at Toni & Guy helped to unleash my creativity. While Sassoon had a strict dress code that included a black shirt and black pants, at Toni & Guy we could wear a black shirt and a kilt if we wanted to. I loved that edginess. My stint at Toni & Guy was a key part of my evolution and development as a hairdresser.
But ultimately, it all came back to that first day of class at the Sassoon Academy when I was still a young apprentice. I meant it when I told my mum that I wanted to grow up to be the female Vidal Sassoon. And I always hoped in the back of my head that I would get the opportunity to meet him and show him what I could do as a hairdresser.
That opportunity finally came in the most unlikely of circumstances. It was after I finished competing on the first season of Bravo’s Shear Genius. I had been eliminated during a challenge where I was forced to pair with the one competitor who really made my blood boil. In fact, I referred to Tyson as “the weasel.” Apparently, it made for great TV, but I genuinely didn’t care for the guy, and let’s face it, I am never one to pull any punches with my honesty. We were expect
ed to style the hair of a bride and members of her wedding party as part of this challenge. He ultimately fumbled the updo he was responsible for, leaving me to do my work and fix his shoddy work too within a narrow time frame. We went down in flames and I let him have it right on national television.
So, of course, the organizers of the Stylist Choice Awards at the Orlando Hair Show thought it would be a brilliant idea to reintroduce me to the weasel in a mud-wrestling type of stage competition. We each had to re-create the finale of Shear Genuis—completing a cut, color, and a total makeover for three models in three hours. I didn’t want to do it and had seriously contemplated canceling. By then, I had had enough of Tyson, reality TV, and the whole spectacle. I just wanted to be left alone to do great hair. But everyone told me that I would look petty and scared if I bailed, so I went onstage and did the stupid stunt. And I slaughtered him. I can’t lie—it was satisfying, but only in a small and frankly slightly petty way. I already knew I was a far better hairdresser than he was. I didn’t need to prove that to anyone (not to mention I was a better TV personality, having been voted the fan favorite on the show).
The real triumph came later, however, when backstage I turned around and came face-to-face with my idol . . . Vidal Sassoon. He looked like . . . well, the most refined rock star I have ever seen. And I won’t lie. I swooned a little. Vidal stopped by to tell me that I was the first hairdresser he had seen do that quality of work since Roger Thompson, his creative director back in the heyday of Sassoon. I started to cry. The compliment may not mean anything to the layperson, but to a hairdresser it means everything. It means I had become the rock star I had always wanted to be. I will never be Vidal Sassoon—no one will. But that day, which started as an annoying lark with Tyson and a stupid reality-TV rematch, ended up being the day my dream came true. It just goes to show that you may think something is small and petty, but you should always give it your all because it could lead to something huge. It could lead you to your dream. In that moment, I knew everything I had done, every choice I had made up until that point, were the rights ones. Because they got me here.
Living the Dream
• It isn’t easy to “live the dream,” but for some people it’s even harder to figure out what “the dream” is. I knew early on that I wanted to be a hairdresser, but if you’re one of those people casting about trying to figure it out or saying, “Oh well, I’ll just go to law school,” then I have a few key questions that you should ask yourself:
• “What makes you miserable?” While this might not seem like the logical starting place, it is. You’d be amazed how many law school graduates hate practicing law. They should have asked themselves this question before they applied.
• “When you have a Sunday afternoon with nothing to do, how do you spend it?” Now, if your answer is in bed with a bowl of cold cereal, I can’t necessarily pinpoint your dream—other than to say it involves Cap’n Crunch. But even reading the newspaper tells you something. Maybe you want to report the news or deal with politics. Maybe you like the sports page and will become the manager of the New York Yankees. And that brings me to my second point:
• Dream big. Leave it to others—whether it’s your sworn enemy or your mother—to tell you something can’t be done. If you have a dream, supersize it. It’s healthier than a Happy Meal and doesn’t cost you anything. Go after your dream like it’s the biggest deal you have ever seen and treat it like a monster to be tamed. If it’s easy to attain, then it might not be your dream after all.
Chapter 7
My Very First Salon Takeover
FORGET ALL THE STRUCTURE that I had encountered at Vidal Sassoon and Toni & Guy—there was none of that when I moved on to work at another London salon with a talented hairdresser, whose entrepreneurial style at that time was very laid-back. When I first arrived there, the stylists rocked out when they wanted to rock out, doing their own hair in the salon, shouting from one end of the place to the other, and just making do when they didn’t have the products they needed. After my two previous places of employment, it felt totally disorganized to me. And it was. Instead of getting into trouble if I didn’t look and act a certain way or arrive at work on time, it was suddenly okay if I missed the train and showed up ten minutes late or went out to lunch and took an extra half hour to do some shopping. It was incredibly different, which was eye-opening and weird, but it was also liberating to get away with a few things, and soon I was becoming just as lax as everyone else.
That’s when I realized it was a problem for me. I was letting my standards slip, and after four or five months I started to ask the salon owner why it was okay for people to come in late or leave clients waiting or shout across the salon. He was a very nice man and a really, really good hairdresser, but I guess he just didn’t want to be the bad guy who told people what to do. Every year, he’d go away for three or four weeks with his family, and when he was gone it would be a free-for-all. During one of those trips, I finally thought, “This is fucking madness, I can’t take it anymore.”
This man permitted everyone who worked for him to have a key and trusted that whoever was in first would turn the lights on and get the place ready for business. Well, as it turned out, I was the first one there every morning. Before long I was also the one making sure the place was clean enough to open for business and I became the person who stayed later to ensure that the towels were ready for the next day, too. After taking on all this extra responsibility, I decided to have a conversation with him about how crazy the whole setup was. He agreed that he needed some help and asked me to manage the salon for him. Welcome to an early version of Tabatha’s Salon Takeover.
This conversation wasn’t intended to be about me becoming the manager. That’s not what I wanted at all. It was more about drawing my boss’s attention to the fact that when he was away, no one showed up until ten o’clock in the morning. The salon should have been open at nine. One of my colleagues frequently had his first appointments at ten, but he didn’t arrive until eleven, so his clients just sat there for all that time.
The culture that I had come from at my previous salons required that we all reflect well on each other—the theory was that if I screw up, it affects the name of the salon and it affects the stylist next to me, too. That’s what happens when there’s a team of people who all work together. So when I became manager I really shook things up. I was a bit of a bull in a china shop, as I had never overseen anyone else’s work before. This was the beginning of my tough-love boot-camp rants: “What are you doing, walking in after a night on the town, wearing the same clothes you wore yesterday with your hair in a bloody mess? It’s ridiculous!” Or “How can you leave your client sitting there for twenty minutes while you go out and buy a coffee? It’s bloody crazy!”
Everyone was taken aback when I spoke to them that way, as the salon owner had never complained about their behavior before. So when Dominatrix Coffey began throwing her weight around, a lot of people responded with a quick “Fuck you!” Most of them had been working at the salon longer than me, so they thought they were more senior and therefore didn’t need to follow my rules. Some even thought they were more deserving of the manager’s job. However, if they’d been really deserving, they would have been doing the right thing all along.
There were two receptionists, five assistants, and nine stylists, and I knew they were getting away with murder because, without any structural rules, there were times when I could get away with murder, too. So their pissed-off attitude didn’t intimidate me; it just made me mad and indignant. When they would ask, “What do you mean?” or “ Why do I have to do it?,” I’d simply say, “Because that’s the rule now. So, fucking do it!”
Since my management role required that I take on a heavier workload, I never thought it would provoke such hostile reactions. In my mind, I was simply doing what was best for the business, and who doesn’t want the best? It didn’t occur to me that some people were only interested in what was best for them. So when I hi
t them with straightforward logic derived from past experiences, such as it makes sense not to keep a client waiting and it makes sense to have your hair done before you get to work—I didn’t expect such belligerent responses. But I understood it. The ones who lashed out were lazy and self-indulgent.
Standing my ground, I next had to deal with the good-cop-bad-cop scenarios. When I told certain stylists, “You cannot do this, it’s unacceptable,” they’d go running to the owner in the hope that he’d say, “It’s okay.” I, of course, didn’t need these contradictions because they would seriously undermine me. So, again, I had a word with my boss and told him that if he didn’t stick up for me when this happened, I wouldn’t be able to work for him anymore. I mean, why make the effort just to get stressed out and be totally ineffective? He was the one who, having seen how responsible and trustworthy I was, had asked for my help running his salon so that when he took time off or was out of the salon on other business, he could be assured that everything would be okay.
That talk did the trick, and to my boss’s credit he always backed me up thereafter. In fact, his wife once called me and said, “Thank you. What you are doing has made such a difference.”
With his support, I was able to help the salon run more efficiently. He trusted that the salon would be open on time and that it would be clean, and he could also rest assured that the assistants were doing their job, the clients were being taken care of, the necessary products were always available, and no one was fiddling with his money. Still, it wasn’t always smooth sailing. One time I had a huge screaming match with one of the male stylists in the middle of the salon when no clients were around. He went absolutely mental because I told him he was habitually late and had to show up for work on time: “Who the fuck do you think you are? How dare you tell me what to do!”
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