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Review: Vidal

Cutting-edge memoirs

October 7, 2010 10:36
Vidal Sassoon: from fighter of fascists and Zionist volunteer to top tonsor

ByJan Shure, Jan Shure

2 min read

By Vidal Sassoon
Macmillan, £20

What this entertaining and inspiring autobiography makes startlingly clear is that Vidal Sassoon, now 82, belongs to that generation of Jews whose career path might have taken them in a totally different direction if poverty had not early on forced them out of education and into work.

If the young Vidal had received those educational opportunities, however, the world would have been a decidedly less glamorous place. Yet the man who is still the planet's most famous crimper and whose revolutionary cutting techniques in the late 1950s and '60s changed the relationship between fashion and hairdressing, took up his career with the greatest reluctance.

Born in 1928, the son of a Greek-Sephardi father and an Ashkenazi mother, his childhood was marked by severe hardship, graphically described in the early chapters. After his father deserted his mother, Betty, she, three-year-old Vidal and his brother, Ivor, aged six months, moved in with his widowed aunt and her three daughters, all of them occupying a two-room tenement in Wentworth Street, in the heart of the Jewish East End, part of what Sassoon describes as a "vast, gloomy rabbit-warren of ugly little flats".