Simon McAndrew Hairstylist

Category: Memories

  • Japan, a cast of seven.

    Mukuge Tsuwabuki, the headhunter, found me in a bohemian Parisienne art-squat. I’d waited patiently for about a year as he searched the globe for someone to better me. I was twenty-three, fresh from Sassoon, full of technique and the beginnings of a generous topping artiness. I had no idea what I was about to do with it next. He wanted me in Nagoya. I checked my emails weekly on Sandy’s internet connection in the attic of the squat. On the other side of the planet there was a salon, a college, students. Knowledge to transfer across a language barrier. Of course I wanted in.

    What I didn’t know was the salon would be getting the best students because of the exotic prestige of my presence. In preparation I had documented everything I’d learned about cutting hair, illustrating it in CorelDraw, and printing it out into an A5 ringbinder textbook so as to share my freshly gained knowledge. In retrospect I imagine myself as an inverted medieval journeyman.

    But before any of that lands, I’d like to introduce you to the seven people who’ll go on to shape it all. I’ve changed their names.

    Mukuge Tsuwabuki was the headhunter who’d found me. He had a clarity about what he wanted. Me. Specifically, because of where I’d trained and the curious kudos I carried with me. Mukuge was the plug.

    Yubāba Sama was the head of the college. I never quite managed a real conversation with her. She existed at a distance, formal and present, but always slightly out of reach. I’d never see her in corridors, and the space between us never closed. Later, I’d understand that distance was, in fact, unclosable.

    Fujiwara Shigeru owned the salon. Little did I know at the outset he was the one who’d arranged the whole contract, the college placement etc. He sped us in his brand new Audi TT along the overhead motorways to exotic retreats where we’d never quite get to the point. It was like he’d made something work that shouldn’t have.

    Leonara Laustralienne was my co-expatriot. Australian, pragmatic, not so far from home. We’d sit in the hyper-French café, piecing together what was actually happening over many coffees. She’d be amazed at my ability to navigate the city. She worked in the salon, I worked in the school. We met up at night school and would drink sweet coffee together.

    The students. About sixty high school leavers, three groups, twenty at a time. They were a mix of keen, curious, mystified and mischievous. Interested in me as a novelty. Sometimes I’d have Mukuge Tsuwabuki translate for me, sometimes a dedicated translator and sometimes it was just me, the students, my textbook and the whiteboard. They were sharp and quick to learn, but as I’d find out, part of a much more complicated dynamic than had been explained.

    The café staff. Ever-present but invisible, they knew my order before I arrived. They were stable in a way nothing else was and they reminded me of home. That place was like a portal to Paris. Again I’d found myself a sanctuary, but this time in café form.

    And of course last but by no means least: me! Twenty-three, still believing that technical knowledge was enough. Hoping that year of waiting in a Parisienne art house hadn’t been in vain.

    The first weeks were amazing and exhausting in equal measure. Twelve hour days, every day of the week. Trips across the country every other weekend. I drew from my book onto the whiteboard. The students understood my diagrams. It felt purposeful, in the classroom, I was in my element.

    But the admin side of things got shiftier as the weeks went by.

    The contract, the one Fujiwara had drawn up, began to unravel. My scissors, which Eugene had gifted me, went missing. Being taken to elaborate resorts, swept into karaoke bars almost every night after work, drowning in presents and cards on Valentine’s Day, flirtation from my female students which I had no framework for dealing with.

    I was learning Nagoya by myself, piecing together what was actually happening through conversations with estate agents, other expatriates at night school, anyone who could speak English. Slowly realizing that what I’d signed up for wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

    And somewhere in all of that the 5 am starts, the stolen scissors, the karaoke, the presents, I began to understand that I wasn’t here as a teacher. I was here as a gift. A human present from the salon to the school. A novelty. A way to get the best students.

    That’s when things stopped being unclear.

  • Moving to Paris with 500 French Franks and a week’s stay booked at Woodstock hostel.

    It was the last day of Paris Fashion Week. The day had started at 5am. I’d finished my last show, the champagne was wearing off and found myself standing in Nation with nowhere in particular to be. Zoning out at my own reflection in a shop window with the mid afternoon sunlight bouncing up from the wet pavement, I zoned back in and noticed I was staring at an estate agent’s window. Full of Paris properties. Then it dawned on me…

    I was supposed to go back to London that evening and then start looking for a flat. Standing there, I realised I was already looking for a flat, not in London… In Paris!

    The inventory in full:

    • ¾ of a German A-level
    • £50 survival money.
    • A week’s hostel booked.
    • A few contacts.
    • A wing.
    • A prayer.
    @Alin.Chernii

    [TK-link] I went to tell Eugene my new plans later that afternoon.

    By this point I’d been to Paris with Eugene a handful of times between early ’97 and mid ’99. So the city wasn’t such an unknown quantity to me anymore. In fact, from day one, I’d felt like I knew my way around automatically, as if I’d been born with a Plan de Paris preinstalled in my mind’s GPS. That was particularly handy because at the time my highly advanced communication device was a Pager Swatch with a teeny tiny number display – mobile phones could just about display letters. It would be another 10 years before I could download Nokia maps on my phone.

    Going it alone was also strangely comfortable for me. Writing this now I’m starting to appreciate how very independent I have always been. It makes me think of the times when I was 16 and used to hitchhike back down to Cornwall from Guildford… Anyway, on with this story…

    Marion was on Eugene’s team. I had written her number in my blue address book along with any other Parisians I’d meet backstage, which was not many. Marion was the only one who pulled through. Oh, it would be so good to look at that address book! I’m sure it’s in a box somewhere. So yeh, I was already beginning to create myself a network and Paris was waiting to welcome me ‘home’, oddly Paris has always felt like home since those days. I’ve been back more-or-less every couple of years since.

    French turned out simply to be English minus German delivered in voice of René Artois from ‘Allo ‘Allo. My A-level got me further than I expected.

    When the cash ran low, random opportunities followed. Waiting tables in an all night American bar. Testing computer games for a French computer games studio for the American market. Mainly though, assisting Marion on her Longchamp shoots, and a week or so in a very chic salon on Avenue George V. Soon I found myself blow-drying Christophe Robin’s clients in his newly opened colour only studio, walking his little dog around the Tuileries. It was either a chihuahua or a dachshund, I can’t remember which — but boy oh boy did I feel like I blended in!

    When the cash ran low, random opportunities followed. Waiting tables in an all night American bar. Testing computer games for a French computer games studio for the American market. Mainly though, assisting Marion on her Longchamp shoots, and a week or so in a very chic salon on Avenue George V.

    Soon I found myself blow-drying Christophe Robin’s clients in his newly opened colour-only studio, walking his little dog around the Tuileries whenever nature called.

    It was either a chihuahua or a dachshund, I can’t remember which but boy oh boy did I feel like I blended in!

    In retrospect, I firmly believe we create our own luck, or more precisely we create the circumstances for luck to find us.

  • Farewell at Hotel Costes

    Call sheets came by fax. We photocopied them, marked them up, and passed them around backstage. This was pre-email, pre-smartphone. Practically speaking, it was pre-internet. The world ran at the speed of paper, of physical objects moving between hands, of decisions made face to face because there wasn’t another way.

    Eugene and I had been working together for about eighteen months by then. The London-based team took multiple trips a year to Paris. It was a working rhythm I’d grown into and enjoyed.

    One afternoon I went to his room at Hotel Costes to tell him that I had decided to move to Paris.

    I hadn’t planned the conversation. I just knew I needed to say it before I caught the evening Eurostar back to London. I knocked on his door. He let me in and I told him the news.

    His response was immediate and calm. He pointed out that his is a London-based team. If I moved to Paris, that would mean I could no longer be on his team. He said it without weight, without accusation. Just a fact.

    I think my exact words were something like:

    “Yeah, but… Paris!”

    That was my whole argument. That was everything I had to say for myself. Paris. As if the word alone explained the decision, the pull, the inevitability of it. Maybe it did.

    He didn’t try to stop me. No argument, no persuasion, no friction. He respected me and my decision completely. He said to call back in before catching my evening Eurostar.

    I understand his response more now than I did then. At nineteen, I just took it as Eugene being Eugene. Easy, unflustered, ungrudging. It’s only with distance that I see the full shape of what he did. He was losing a team member. He’d invested time in me, brought me to Paris repeatedly, he’d given me a place inside something that obviously matters deeply to him: his team. And when I told him I was walking away from it all, his response was to respect the choice and let me go cleanly.

    There was no manipulation. No “are you sure?” No quiet reminder of what he’d done for me. No Devil Wears Prada attitude, just cool calm acceptance.

    I know now that this was a kindness most people are just not capable of. Most people, faced with someone leaving, find ways to make the leaver feel the weight of it. Guilt, pressure, the soft suggestion that they might be making a mistake. Eugene gave me none of that. He gave me permission, even though I hadn’t asked for it.

    When I came back that afternoon, he came down from his room with a copy of the first Hotel Costes CD in his hand. Mixed by Stéphane Pompougnac. He gave it to me as a parting gift and wished me well.

    I played that CD to my friends as soon as I got back to London, I transferred it to my MiniDisc player and listened to it for years afterwards. Listening back to it now, it has become one of those albums that’s so completely of its time it almost stops being music and becomes a portal into the past. Lounge, downtempo, the late nineties / early noughties in audio form. I still have it at home somewhere, in a box with all my old stuff at my parents’ place.

    Years passed, decades in fact. Then, recently, I came across a copy in my local Oxfam bookshop. Of course I bought it without hesitation.

    I put a note inside it. More than a note really, a message, and quite an intense one at that. The kind of thing you can only write when enough time has passed to allow you to say what needs to be said. I told him about what that exchange meant, about what his response taught me, about the shape of his kindness, which I only fully understood years later.

    The CD and note sat in my kit bag at the salon for at least a month, waiting.

    When Eugene finally came in to the salon to prep for a big shoot recently, I gave it to him.

    I couldn’t see his expression properly as he opened it. I was in the middle of a haircut, but I’m sure I caught the corner of a smile as I turned back to my client.

    He kind of just stuffed the note into one of his unpredictable pockets.

  • Paris with Eugene

    I remember standing in the minimal dark bathroom on that first evening in Paris before dinner. A film set of a bathroom. Looking at my reflection I thought about my school friends; many of them confided that their degrees felt pointless and that they were just going through the motions because they didn’t know what else to do. They were waiting tables or stacking supermarket shelves to pay their way towards degrees which they really weren’t sure about.

    I was staying in a hotel on Rue St Honoré ready for Paris Fashion Week.

    I did have the unnerving sense that I’d ended up somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be: impostor syndrome. But ultimately it was Eugene who’d asked me to be there and who was I to question his judgement? I knew my way around a hairdryer just as well as I knew how to plug a MiniDisc player into a backstage sound system. I was useful, I was there and I deeply wanted to help. Although I hadn’t planned it, it was great. Having fallen into hair like this, all I had to do now was just figure out a way of staying around and keeping it together.

    Eugene gave me his MiniDisc and Creative Soundblaster, a subwoofer with four tweeters, to plug together and place strategically around backstage. This was long before Bluetooth. Setting up the sound system was always one of the very first things we did. Once the tunes were playing, everything else started to slot into place. Eugene introduced me to KRS-One through that glorious setup, and I never let that thread drop.

    Individual pret-a-porter shows are hard to separate now, they’ve merged into one. The pace of them, the noise, the cigarettes, the champagne afterwards. Studio visits are calmer and clearer memories. Sarah Moon was cogitating elegantly through a very bright rooflit loft studio. Paolo Roversi was smoking heavily, drinking lots of coffee, he had a patio with trellises and dark ground floor rooms.

    The slower Haute Couture mornings I also remember more clearly. One that particularly stands out decades later was Viktor and Rolf in what might as well have been a full-on greenhouse of a studio. Everywhere there was an intense seriousness and dedication about the work. A quiet focused methodical work, timelessly prepared for.

    Eugene moved through all of it with a quality I didn’t have a word for then. I do now: Sprezzatura from the Italian meaning something like studied effortlessness. Nothing performed, nothing wasted; just an easiness with existence. I find this calmness about Eugene so comforting; it’s like he emanates peace. Even in places like Paris, which I think he once told me is his least favourite city.

    I was watching everything. Taking in as much as I could.

  • My name on a board in Gare du Nord

    Eugene’s first mission for me was as follows: Get on the Eurostar to Paris. Go to Delorme. Buy plain black barrettes. Bring them back to London.

    He conveyed this mission with a particular humility that’s unique to Eugene.

    He knew what it sounded like, sending someone to Paris to go shopping for hairclips. He’d tried hard to find the particular design the brief called for – completely black and flat, nothing ornate or unusual; deceptively simple. But they were nowhere to be found in London. So, to Paris it was!

    I got off the Eurostar at Gare du Nord having smoked myself silly all the way there in the dedicated carriage. When I stepped out of the arrivals gate, lo and behold there was the chauffeur holding a board with my name written on it! Obviously I had been told that was the plan, but actually seeing this man dressed in a black suit and tie walking me to a a brand new Mercedes, driving me through Paris to Le passage de l’Industrie. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.

    I hadn’t been to Paris since I was very young. I had no memory of those visits, apart from a vague recollection of going up the Eiffel Tower. Standing there at Gare du Nord, my name on a board in front of me, it felt like a spiritual homecoming.

    I stepped out of the car and in through the glass doors of Delorme. There were very many plain black barrettes, I found the specified shape and style, bought them all and made my way back to London.

    It turned out the clips on the inside also needed to be black, but the shape was perfect. We spray painted the clips. To this day I’ve never seen a black barrette with a black metal clip.

    Believe me, I’ve been looking!

  • The best 50p I ever spent

    There were two of us in the phonebox on Cricklewood Broadway that sunny Monday afternoon. We were both assistants at John Frieda at the time, both with the same idea about where we wanted to be – on set. We were skint and shared the rent for a room in a flat above our landlord’s afro salon. £45 each/week, mostly paid for from our tips. If my rent fell behind, I’d make it up washing out relaxers for her on Sundays.

    I’d heard the name Streeter’s on set enough times by that point so summoned up the courage to find the agency’s number in the good ol’ Yellow Pages. Beverley (Streeter) had helped Eugene Souleiman get where he was. If you wanted to work in fashion as a hairdresser, hers was the number. We both knew it…

    I put in the 50p and called.

    Tentatively I asked how we could go about assisting something along the lines of:

    “Hi, we’re assistants at John Frieda and we want to work in fashion, ideally assisting Eugene…”

    That sounds pretty audacious when I see it in writing like that, but in the moment it felt perfectly normal.

    “Can you come to the office in Farringdon next Monday?”

    As Korean was his first language, I’d been doing the talking, we’d been sharing the earpiece until that point. I turned to him and raised a questioning eyebrow. He looked panicky, but there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind. I went alone.

    Beverley put me directly in touch with Eugene who invited me over to his place later that week. He cooked me a simple delicious dinner, steamed new potatoes, peas and carrots in minty butter with milk poached fish. Over a couple of beers we talked about what I thought of the training at Toni & Guy and John Frieda, what assisting experience I’d had and why I wanted to work in fashion.

    The hospitality, the attention, the respect and kindness with which Eugene treated me is as fresh in my mind today as it was then. It was one of the most memorable and life changing exchanges I’ve ever had looking back it almost feels like some surreal dream.