Salon Selective

Have the sprawling beauty palaces of the eighties and nineties gone the way of big hair? Alexandra Kleeman tracks down the under-the-radar spaces specializing in the ultimate luxury: un dividedattention.

- Alexandra Kleeman

In the movies I watched growing up in suburban Colorado—Desperately Seeking Susan, John Waters’s Hairspray—the hair salon was always where the protagonist, with the aid of a few dozen helping hands, left behind her old, drab exterior and emerged radiant, ready to embark on her adventure. This metamorphic potential was further underlined by the megasalons of the eighties and early nineties that I read about in my mother’s dog-eared fashion magazines: bustling, white chrome palaces filled with supermodels and presided over by hair royalty—names like Vidal Sassoon, Frédéric Fekkai, and Sally Hersh berger.