The story of Australian hairdressing, Part 2: the 1970s

Words: Victoria Meppem, 23 June 2008

Model agent Peter Chadwick (Elle Macpherson et al) commenced his career as a pharmacist, segueing to salon receptionist in 1971 when he went into business with the exuberant Xenon. “We found premises in Rose Bay and established a very upmarket, Eastern Suburbs clientele. Xenon was doing magazine work including the first Cleo cover with Georgia Riley,” he says.

Tabberer was still a loyal Xenon client and says that while doing The Maggie Show for Channel 7, Xenon would arrange her hair using the craziest hair pieces. “I had more hair than the Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer lion. Xenon used wigs, hairpieces, falls and plaits. He was very inventive and a real showman.” The salon closed in 1976 when the exuberant Xenon (he posed naked as a Cleo centerfold) left for the US where he lived until his death in 2001. “He was so flamboyant,” remembers Chadwick. “I reckon the day he died he probably still had jet black, tight curly hair and a shirt that was open to his navel.”

When John Adams opened his new salon in 1975 it was the 69th salon in Double Bay. “Ita Buttrose started doing stories on hairdressers in Cleo and I was one of them,” he says. “It created so much excitement at the time. There weren’t so many session stylists so it was easy for us to do covers for magazines and editorial work.”

Farrah Fawcett flicks were the order of the day and Lloyd Lomas was your man if you wanted seductive, soft feminine hair. Now based in his salon at the Pitt Street end of the fashionably restored Strand Arcade (the original George Street end had gone up in flames a few years prior – nothing to do with Lomas), he kept Wednesdays for his editorial work.

Lloyd Lomas not only looked the part, he helped define the Australian look of the 1970s.

Sexy was a word synonymous with Lomas.

With his leather pant-encased, mustachio-ed good looks he naturally drew comparisons with Warren Beatty’s character as the stylist George in Shampoo. Actress Kate Fitzpatrick, a client from the beginning, reminisces, “It really was like Shampoo but without all the girls; Lloyd was very happily married.” Lomas designed Fitzpatrick’s cherry- red-one-day, blonde-the-next ’do for the original Australian production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and a plaited and ringlet confection when she played the title role in the 1979 Sydney Theatre Company’s The Lady of the Camellias. “I think half of Sydney’s stylists working today learnt how to tong, straighten and crimp on my hair,” she says. “I had every kind of style you could imagine.”

The Strand salon soon became as infamous as its owner.

“Everything was in pale pink,” says Fitzpatrick. Writer William Petley adds, “Even the female salon staff wore pale pink boiler suits and looked like cute bunnies.” When Lomas’ wife Trish had their son Christian, he watched the hustle and bustle of the salon from the safety of his playpen. It makes sense that Christian, now 30, has followed in Lomas’s footsteps and works beside his parents in their Double Bay salon, along with sister Dominique.