When Michael Gordon uses the word “hero” to describe the 12 stylists he profiles, he’s not kidding. And although he’s not trying to place his subjects on the same level as, say, the firefighters of 9/11, they’re certainly at the top of the heap when it comes to the top of your head. There’s Kenneth Battelle, who invented the Jackie Kennedy bouffant, and Sydney Guilaroff, head stylist on 1,500 films during Hollywood’s golden age. And of course Vidal Sassoon, who Gordon calls the Frank Lloyd Wright of the tonsorial world. But even for those of us who know these names only as brands of shampoo, there’s interesting history within—for one thing, Sassoon tells us how he invented blow-drying. (“That weekend I couldn’t think of anything else,” he says of his Edisonian flash of insight.) Now if only we knew who came up with the mullet.
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