When news came that Vidal Sassoon died May 9 at age 84, Joe Randazzo was immediately on the phone commiserating with friends on the mainland, all alumni of Sassoon salons and his philosophy that the cut is everything.
“I wasn’t crying or anything, but I got really emotional. It was almost like losing a family member,” said Randazzo, co-owner of J Salon on Ala Moana Boulevard. “I had the good fortune to meet him a couple of times, and he was such an amazing person. He had a charm about him that made you want to be around him. Not many people have that. And the passion for his work.
“I also felt it was even more important to carry on his legacy, because it’s what I learned from him that has gotten me to where I am today.”
Randazzo arrived at the Vidal Sassoon salon at Water Tower Place in Chicago as an impressionable 17-year-old who just happened to be accompanying his sister while she was getting a haircut.
“I walked in and I was just in awe. I loved everything about the place. I loved what the people looked like, the posters on the wall, the way everyone dressed. There was that instant click.”
He was considering taking up art studies in college, but that day he decided he was going to become a hairstylist, with one condition: If he didn’t land a job with Sassoon after attending beauty college, he wasn’t going to work with hair again.
Luckily for his Hawaii clientele, Randazzo got hired as an assistant, though it would take 18 months of training and testing before he would be allowed to cut a client’s hair.
“The manager at that time told me it wasn’t going to be easy. He said, ‘No more concerts or parties for you. From now on you’ll be studying. We take things very seriously here.’ And I said, ‘Bring it on.'”
Sassoon was a perfectionist through and through, as reflected in his clean, geometric cuts and the five-point bob first modeled in 1963 by Grace Coddington, now creativedirector of American Vogue. The sharp helmet cut had a “W” shape at the nape and a pointed spike in front of each ear.
In an obituary that appeared in The , Coddington said, “He changed the way everyone looked at hair. Before Sassoon, it was all back-combing and lacquer; the whole thing was to make it high and artificial. Suddenly you could put your fingers through your hair!”
You could also run two hands through your hair, jump up and down, run and tumble, and it would settle back into place like a piece of wash-and-wear clothing. When he opened his first salon in London in 1954, he liberated a new class of working women from the 1950s “Hairspray” mode of going to bed in rollers and coaxing up a tower of hair in the morning.
Just as with his cuts, he ran his salons like a military operation, requiring a black-and-white uniform for assistants, with inspections.
“When Phillip Rogers, one of the owners, came to town every three months, he’d line us up and look us up and down,” Randazzo said. “One time he was looking at my right foot and said, ‘Joe, do you drive to work?’ and I said yes. He said, ‘You have a scuff on the back of your shoe. Fix it!’ I’ll never forget that. It’s something I take with me wherever I go, that attention to detail.”
Randazzo said many people have the misconception that Sassoon specialized only in geometric cuts. “Some people are dismissive, saying, ‘Vidal Sassoon, all they do is bobs,’ but if you look at what he’d done from the 1960s through today, you’d see millions of different shapes and textures, curly hair, shattered hair and everything in between.
“I’ve brought my training to J Salon and evolved it even further. We still do geometric, but we also do long, soft, beautiful flowing hair.”
What really characterizes a Sassoon-style cut is that it is clean, sharp and precise, Randazzo said, which demands substance over style.
“There are a lot of people today who rely on visuals, using a razor or putting product on hair to get it to look a certain way. It may take longer to do things my way, but we’re not about the 10-minute haircut.”
Last year, Michael Gordon released a documentary, “Vidal Sassoon the Movie,” and in January, Randazzo hosted movie night at his home for his entire staff. “Some of them are the age I was when I walked into Vidal Sassoon. I know how influential it could be at that age, and I thought it was important for them to know where I came from.”
