Starting out – sweeping floors, salons and fashion shoots
Like
so many other stylists, Nicolas Jurnjack became a player in the
hairdressing game by pure accident. Born and bred in Marseilles,
France, Jurnjack left school at 16, not particularly good at those
subjects that help you get a ‘real’ job. Finding himself at an
unemployment agency, he was handed a list of potential employers to
see, one of which happened to be a hair salon.
“This
salon was very prestigious, with five floors and a transparent
elevator,” recalls Jurnjack. “They needed an apprentice and took me on
immediately.” One Saturday, a fashion crew from French ELLE turned up
at the salon (they were shooting next door and their hair stylist
hadn’t shown up), asking if someone could keep an eye on the model’s
hair. Jurnjack immediately proposed himself. Armed with a comb and a
lot of confidence he went off, ending up with six pages in French ELLE
with his name on them.
From here, Jurnjack had all the
inspiration he needed to knock on model agency doors offering his
services for tests. He left with a long list of photographers to call
but, predictably, not one was willing to give him a chance. So it was
back to the salon. Undeterred, he bought every fashion magazine he
could and three plastic heads with human hair. Every night for the next
year he worked tirelessly in his tiny rented room to reproduce the
looks he was seeing in Vogue created by leading editorial session
stylists like Valentin and Yannick d’Ys.
A fight with the boss
saw Jurnjack leaving the salon for good this time and he went knocking
on agents’ doors, again, without much luck. “I went to every single
magazine with my original ELLE tears, a few tests and left my card,” he
says. It was the August holiday break when most of Paris moves out to
make way for the tourists. Out of the blue, Jurnjack got the call that
was to change his life. “French Vogue were looking for a hairdresser
for their September Haute Couture issue. There was no one in town and
they had found my card. The fashion editor said, ‘We have 14 pages, we
have 14 hats, would you know at least how to put the hair back under
the hats?’ and I said ‘For sure’.” On the shoot, photographer Dominique
Isserman urged the editor to let Jurnjack show his skills. They ended
up ditching the hats and Jurnjack got a new set of tears for his book,
French Vogue no less. |
From here, Jurnjack’s luck turned and this time he got an agent. He
went into intensive self-training mode to perfect his technique,
inspired by his ‘heroes’ who dared to push the boundaries of hair
styling, Kenneth Battelle and Garren. He completed his hairdressing
diploma and enrolled himself in high-end Academy courses, ten in all,
“learning complicated ‘space geometrics’ where you don’t even get to
touch a head – it’s all pure theory”.
By now it was the early
’90s and the big beauty trend was transformation. Julien d’Ys was
putting short wigs on Linda Evangelista; Jurnjack was starting to cut
models’ hair and the agencies were sending him big girls like Amber
Valetta. At the tender age of 23 – by editorial hair standards –
Jurnjack had arrived. He was already working on French, UK, Spanish and
German issues of Vogue; he had a top agent in Paris and was in demand.
But he still felt uneasy.
“At that time, to take your place in
the fashion international top ten you had to be better than the
masters,” he remembers. “And they were out of reach. Going over Garren,
Julien d’Ys or Odile Gilbert was impossible. When I joined the pack, I
had to go bigger: more technical, more precise, more extravagant,
better finished than these guys. It was an enormous challenge. But it
was the only way to access major photographers like Meisel. And to
reach that level, the only way was to do fashion shows and that wasn’t
me at all.”
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