FAMOUS EUROPEAN HAIRDRESSER IS TO VISIT AUSTRALIA

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 September 1947, Page 10

FAMOUS EUROPEAN HAIRDRESSER IS TO VISIT AUSTRALIA

Antoine, the man who introduced the bobbed cut, the sculptured curl and coloured hair to women’s coiffures, and Europe's most.. celebrated hairdresser, will be 63 years old when he visits Australia next year to establish a salon. His birthday is on Christmas Eve.

He - believes that “life begins at sixty.” When one remembers what he has packed into his life since he dressed his first head of hair as his uncle’s apprentice at Lodz in Poland at the age of 17, the remaining years seem to offer him ample opportunity. ' Hair styles, he admits, are harder to plan than hair salons. Antoine abhors mass production, even in caiffutes, so in creating for the future he. says hair will be short or long, simple or elaborate, in natural colours or bizarre shades.

The sculptured curl about which women speak so glibly today, really had its beginning more than 50 years ago in a little Polish village where the' eight-year-old Antoine set the curls on his younger sister’s head —in honey! Women who have become accustomed to having their hair done in cubicles or cubby-holes would be amazed to see the large room in Antone’s Paris salon. Here, dozens of operators stand behind dozens of chairs in a room which seems like a small ballroom. At first sight it would appear that there is no privacy, but each attendant is so occupied with each client that nobody thinks about the clients a few feet away on either side. Throughout his salon Antoine banished white sheets and used instead oale blue peignors specially dyed. Blue is his favourite colour, just as lilies are his favourite flower. He never opens a new enterprise without white flowers, preferably lilies. When he gave a house-warming in his fabulous glass house in Paris in 1927, he ordered 300 dozen white lilies from Holland. Although queens and courtesans, princesses and film stars have all had their heads dressed by Antoine, there is one royal person for whom he has never worked, either when she was Duchess of York or after she was Queen—Elizabeth of England. But he did dress the Duchess of Windsor’s hair on the day of her wedding, and he cut from it a lock which he has kept. And there is one woman whose appearance Antoine has never tried to change—Fauvette, his wife, who has been, and is, the business manager of all his enterprises. She would never let him touch her hair.