Page 3.
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Edward Beale's looks were pure 70s cool.
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Whitehead left Beale and joined
Peter Metropolis and George Zogoolas who had opened Rifmik in Chapel
Street.
“We had our first Rifmik hair show in 1977 and about 800 people
showed up,” says Whitehead. Inspired by the designer clothes that
edgier clients were wearing, he’d fashioned spiral perm rods out of
wood and flat versions from rulers that zig-zagged hair, creating a ‘Z’
curl.
“Our first cut for Rifmik was a Sassoon haircut called The Shake and we ran an ad in Vogue introducing it as ‘Brush it, wear it, wash it, shake it.’ And we were 12 months ahead of anyone else on that.”
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The rumble from the streetwise, however – confirmed in a wide-reaching innovation called the video clip – suggested loud and clear that the Sassoon moment was about as relevant to the aspired look as the banished bouffant. While Rifmik was brushing up Melbourne, Hastie was Sassoon-side in London, his aesthetic gob-smacked by the punks pounding the pavement under their Mohawks challenging the accepted styling philosophy.
“Going down the Kings Road was so different to anything we’d seen,” he says.
“The biggest influence on me was a New Zealand-born art director at Sassoon’s (him again) training called Flint Whincop. He was absorbing the influence street fashion had on loosening up hair, much to the astonishment of the Sassoon hierarchy, and that really lead me to seeing a different side of hairdressing.”
By then, the next spin was scissoring its way in…
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Paul Whitehead's work in the 70s, including his signature look The Shake, literally turned heads in the fashion and beauty industry.
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Like this story? See the rest of the Victoria Meppem 'History of the Australian hair industry' series here.
NEXT TIME: THE CRAZY 1980s.
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