After arriving in Australia from the Elizabeth Arden salon in London “Too long ago for me to care to remember” (some time in the early 50s), Lillian Frank found herself in the enviable position of being able to take her pick of three jobs.
“I went to see what was on offer but I really knew the one at Arden in Melbourne was for me,” she says. “Miss Arden didn’t really like women doing hair,” she recalls, “But in London, I had been watching what the boys were doing and gradually they started letting me finish their clients.” Frank’s obvious talent became noticed after her cosmopolitan eye spotted a girl with great hair at a local bus stop. “She was a student, just beautiful, and I convinced her to be a hair model for me. We did pictures for the Herald Sun and they were the first hair pictures to be published in Australia.”
Five years later, Lillian and Antonio’s was founded on Collins St. “We had big chandeliers, Chagall-inspired partitions and girls queuing around the block,” she recalls. Melbourne’s chicest women flocked to Frank, including Jean Shrimpton whose hair she styled for that infamous Derby Day in 1965 when The Shrimp appeared, a mini revealing her stocking-less legs, daringly bareheaded. Bob Leopold, the man who lopped Maggie Tabberer’s waist-length locks into a flat, head-hugging bob (it must be said that Max Pinnell, who went on to international acclaim – Herb Ritts, Stephanie Seymour, Gianni Versace, Bette Midler, Ivanka Trump, the list goes on and on – created Tabberer’s signature sweep in 1973), remembers Frank when he arrived in Melbourne from London in 1958. “She was the big bouffant queen and all the socialites had their hair sticking out a mile but that was the order of the day.”
In 1957, at the age of 15, Edward Beale graduated from Melbourne's Associated Hairdressing Academy into the world of hooded dryers and hairnets. “I somehow got a job,” he remembers, “But I wasn’t really all that good, because I didn’t like the way I’d been taught to do hair. It was all backcombing and the high bouffant was the go.” Frustrated by beehives and big hair, Beale employed cutting techniques – usually reserved for men’s hair – he’d observed during his fortnightly visits to the barber and experimented with this blunt, ‘club’ cutting style on his female clients.
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