Cutting-edge cuts
A couple of years ago, I became a serious collector of haircuts. While I can’t afford to buy my clothes at Gucci or Chanel, or hang works by Ed Ruscha or Richard Diebenkorn on my dining room wall, a haute couture haircut is relatively affordable. Why bother living in Los Angeles if you’re not going to participate in at least some aspect of the city’s vanity fair? I’m a big believer in strategic luxury. A $200 haircut, for instance, can go a long way toward compensating for a $14,000 economy car. Think about it: If you had to choose between a Ford Escort and regular haircuts by Laurent D at Prive, or driving a Volkswagen Passat to Supercuts, which package would you select?
I’ll take the dramatic clash of the cheap and fabulous over a steady diet of mediocrity any day. So after several years of wearing my hair long, I showed up on Laurent’s doorstep. Laurent doesn’t cut your hair at a haircutting station but in front of a full-length mirror set up like a stage. This is because the haircut is more like a performance or magic show, complete with two assistants who hand Laurent the various instruments he requires, including a razor, thinning shears and scissors. His process is improvisational. After cutting off the long stuff, he set about changing the texture of my hair, thinning it at the top, then razoring in layers and sculpting them into short, foamy waves.
The end product was a head of short hair that somehow looked like a splendid up-do--it curled charmingly around my ears and pooled at the base of my neck in soft whorls. It was an impressionistic masterpiece--and technically brilliant, for when I washed it the next day, it looked just the same. And the next week. For the next three months it grew out charmingly, and for three months after that it gracefully accepted my whittling here and there with school scissors.
Considering that I managed to eke six months out of this once-in-a-lifetime haircut, I happily would have gone back. But by then I was curious to see how another hair couturier might interpret my locks, so I made an appointment with Etienne Taenaka, the salon director at Vidal Sassoon in Beverly Hills.
The cut Etienne gave me was as different from Laurent’s as could be. He had wanted to study architecture before an epiphany led him to his true calling, and his sense of structure was keen and linear. I let slip that I was a believer in asymmetry, so he took one half of my bangs down to a spiky stubble, while the other he tapered into a long forelock. The rest hugged my head in a sleek, precise helmet. I looked somewhat like an alien from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” but the overall effect was still fundamentally pretty--something about the gentle, precise curves made my neck look long and graceful, and my cheekbones seemed higher than usual.
Six months later, after growing out my hair to try something different, I ended up in the chair of Kristoff, who was at Fred Segal Beauty in Santa Monica at the time. I was supposed to be there for highlights, but he volunteered to give my hair the once-over to help it along. Half an hour later, my hair was at least 2 inches longer--I swear--and I looked as if I should be topless on the beach at Cannes.
Once I grew out my hair sufficiently, I was tempted to return to Kristoff, who is now at Chris McMillan salon, to see what he could do when given a truly blank canvas. I decided to save him for later, though, and visit someone whose work I had long admired: Carla Gentile, owner of Steam, a Moroccan-themed “hair spa” off Beverly Boulevard.
Carla is a fortysomething rock ‘n’ roll babe from the Midwest. When I arrived for my cut, she was wearing skinny jeans and gold lame cowboy boots, and her Patti Smith shag was shot through with dark, subtle layers of deep purple, maroon, fuchsia and orange that lay like feathers on the wing of a psychedelic falcon and matched the jewel tones of her hand-woven top.
I left Steam with a soft, shaggy cut that had more layers to it than a Chekhov drama. My hair tends to stick out here and there for no reason, and shags often leave me with at least one annoying cowlick, but this one didn’t. The cut Carla gave me fell lazily around my face in a way that softened my features and made me look about 10 years younger.
But the problem with a long rock ‘n’ roll shag is that it can turn on you suddenly. One day it’s great, and the next it’s just off, like a quart of milk left in the fridge one day too long. When this happened, I decided to visit a well-known salon on West 3rd Street. When I arrived, I found that my appointment had been changed, and instead of seeing the stylist I was booked for, I was promptly handed over to an ebullient young man who was soon to star in a reality show about hair salons.
I should have known trouble was afoot when hair-boy spent half an hour blowing my hair stick straight, even though I had informed him that I don’t own a blow-dryer. He then gave me a cut that looked fabulous for about three hours. After that, the situation began to deteriorate: The hair that was once straight began to clump and veer. The back poked out this way and that, while choppy wings sprouted beside my face and the bangs did a scary Donald Trump swoosh. It was the worst haircut I’d ever had. I lived this way for three days, and only because I was out of town on business (picture me using a hotel blow-dryer, gulping sobs like a baby). As soon as I got back to town, I headed straight for the hair emergency room: Rudy’s Barbershop in Silver Lake.
Rudy’s is housed in a former auto garage, and after my most recent uptown fiasco, I craved something honest and industrial. I must have sounded hysterical at the front desk because stylist Michael Anthony said he would cut my hair if I waited a few minutes. When my turn in the chair came, I blubbered on about all of the bad haircuts I’d had in the past--where I came out looking like a bank teller or a soap opera ingenue or one of the girls from Bananarama.
Michael listened patiently and proceeded to give me one of the best haircuts of my life: an ultra-short feathered cap with boyish, sexy bangs that made me look as if I had walked out of a 1960s Godard film. Michael’s scissor technique was every bit as artful as Laurent’s, his architectural eye as keen as Etienne’s and his sense of style as soulful as Carla’s. The bill came to $24. I felt like one of those lucky people who discover a Rembrandt at a yard sale. I may collect his haircuts exclusively for a long time to come.
