Long Beach Gets Nice Cut From Hair Show : Commerce: More than 52,000 stylists, salespeople and models drop $33.8 million into the local economy during trade convention.

Sitting on the arm of a raggedy couch backstage at the Terrace Theater, Stephen Moody watches four women in light mesh tops and filmy shorts dance to synthesized music.

The choreography is incidental. Moody is concentrating on the models’ close-cropped hair, glimmering in a rainbow of blond shades.

“Short, textured hair with quite a lot of height in the center, along the top, that’s what’s new,” said Moody, principal of Vidal Sassoon’s internationally known hair academy in Los Angeles. “And blond is big, very big.”

Moody nodded. The models were ready to hit the theater’s stage in the Long Beach Convention Center, where hundreds of hairdressers were waiting for just such trend-setting pronouncements from Sassoon and other national and international stylists who trotted out their designs.

The models danced. The company’s top stylists also demonstrated new cuts on other models. Instamatic cameras flashed throughout the audience to record the latest trends. And then, armed with The Word (blond is big, short is hot), the hairdressers would return home.

This three-day Long Beach Beauty and Trade Show has an impact on fashion as well as the local economy, promoters and city officials say. Yet it came and went with hardly a ripple in Long Beach.

More than 52,000 stylists, salespeople and models arrived from throughout the country and abroad, and dropped about $33.8 million into the local economy by the time the show ended, according to promoters.

The show’s economic impact is second only to the Grand Prix, according to figures offered by the Long Beach Area Convention and Visitors Council. The big race brings in more than 200,000 visitors a year and adds $40 million to $60 million to the economy.

But the beauty and trade show gathering, which began in 1939 as a competition among local hairdressers in the basement of the Masonic Temple on Locust Street, may be harder to ignore in the future. The show will be expanded to five days instead of three. Although the show isn’t open to the general public, the crowd is expected to approach 80,000.

Organizers also expect to take advantage of an expanded Convention Center, nearly quadrupling exhibition space to 320,000 square feet.

That means space for hundreds more booths selling nail polish, hair extensions, acrylic nail extensions, skin care products, capes, T-shirts, wigs and coloring products.

Sponsors hope to attract stylists and beauty manufacturers from Japan, South Korea, Europe and South America, said William Prather, president of Long Beach Hairdressers, which organizes the show.

In Southern California, the Long Beach event is the only hair show of this size.

“There was an L.A. show like this, but it bombed,” said Sassoon’s Moody. “It was downtown and was just not conducive to young girls walking around looking like this.”

He gestured at dozens of young women, staring into mirrors or accepting yet another coating of hair spray. These models had quarter-inch yellow buzz cuts, fountains of red hair springing into space, or mountains of complicated, multicolored curls.

The haircuts shown on stage are usually not everyday styles. This is the avant-garde, the idea factory for your local beautician, who might try to sell the short and blond idea, but probably not that red fountain of hair.

Outside the theater, stylists were buying more modest hairpieces, along with bagloads of hair spray, coloring agents and combs. They stopped at various booths to see the latest permanent wave techniques and test new nail enamels.