The 90s
By Victoria Meppem September 15 2008
Hair by Shibui
From the late 80s, the supermodels reigned supreme and the directions from the international catwalks and magazines lead the way when it came to influencing fashion, makeup and hair.
Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer and Linda Evangelista were celebrities in their own right at a time when fashion couldn’t have been more glamorous; they were the women you wanted to look like. Between them they sported equally polished hair whether it was long and luxe or short and tousled.
And then, amidst the sequins and satin, a cover of the Face magazine featuring a waifish 15 year-old Kate Moss, signalled the beginning of the end to all the glitz. Grunge, an anti-fashion mix of flannel shirts and Doc Martens inspired by Seattle garage bands like Nirvana and championed by designer Marc Jacobs swept the fashion mags like wildfire.
Moss was grunge’s pin-up girl and a wave of gaunt anti-models soon followed in her wake, challenging the perceptions of conventional beauty, upsetting all but the fashion pack - even President Clinton publicly attacked the new ‘heroin chic’.
Rob Hastie and Tracey Colebrook at Shibui were ready and waiting to embrace the new direction.
“When we saw that fashion coming through,” says Hastie, “we thought ‘You beauty, this is what we’re already doing’.”
Grunge was also about an attitude.
“We did a lot of freehand cutting then,” says Robert Bava of his then salon Groove Haircutters in Adelaide. “And if you couldn’t do it with your fingers, we just didn’t do it. We would wash the hair, blow dry it with our hands and then cut it. Rob Hastie played a big part influencing us on that. It was fun but looking back I guess it was a bit arrogant and ignorant. I wasn’t concerned then about service, I was more concerned about the hair, the image and the looks we wanted to achieve but then again, we attracted clients that thought along that way too.”
 Hair by Shibui
Caterina Di Biase from Heading Out Hair & Beauty in Victoria also remembers. “Everything was messy, just like you had got up from a romp in bed and to get that look, you needed product.”
Stylist Kevin Murphy says, “You wanted to look grungy but not dirty. I think it was also a need to look slick in a different sort of way, probably done but not stitched up. Hair product had always been there but it was not relevant to the styles people now wanted.”
Frustrated at the lack of effective products on the market, Murphy set about creating his own.
“I started making products in the early 90s mainly for my salon (Kusco-Murphy) and my clientele. I wanted to get a dirty look without being greasy or heavy – the hair still had to look moist and have a sheen to it. My products were different because we used skin-care ingredients that were weightless and absorbed much easier because of the smaller molecule size.”
Today, the products have pretty much taken over Murphy’s life.
“I spend six months of the year travelling and teaching people about my range and the other six months developing new products. We create everything from scratch so it takes me about a year to get six products done. At present it looks like the brand is heading towards the most successful hair product launch in history. It’s huge and I think the reason for the success is that all the really great hair brands have been made with hairdressers in the driving seat.
“Since the 90s we’ve only seen multinational brands control the industry and a bunch of marketing guys telling the hairdressers what they will be doing next year. I have the unique and possibly naive position to have wanted to make my own products because I wasn’t happy with the products available. I thought, bugger that, I’ll make my own, never realising I could have just become famous and a company would have put my name on a bottle and I’d make squillions. Oh well, I’m glad I did it the wrong way.”
Product wasn’t the only thing to grow the industry to the next stage – the 90s marked a massive shift in colour at a salon level and models like Linda Evangelista and Kristen McMenamy, who switched shades from platinum blonde to dark to red in the turn of a magazine page, fuelled the boom.
Colourist Alyson Schoer remembers pestering Anthony and Susa Wynne-Hoelscher to include a colourist category in their Hair Expo awards, ringing every salon she could to garner support. Along with fellow colourists like Bryan Thompson, she was to help secure the role of the colouring to be regarded as important as cutting and styling.
Read more about Australian hairdressing history in the 90s.
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