Keith Wainwright (1944-2024)

Hairdressing legend

Yesterday I learned of the passing of pioneering hairdresser Keith Wainwright which was sad news. I met Keith back in the late 90s to profile him for my beauty pages in i-D magazine, a lovely man and we chatted away as he did my hair at his famous Chelsea salon Smile, just around the corner from Vivienne Westwood’s World’s End shop. I was particularly interested to meet him because he’d created one of my most loved catwalk hairstyles of all time - the simultaneously punky, cherubic and retro sausage curls that graced models’ hair for Westwood’s Harris Tweed collection, in 1987, and that to some extent became her and her muses’ hair signature in the late 80s and early 90s. “Keith Wainwright executed Vivienne’s idea of styling the models’ hair stiffly into large cylindrical shapes as though the rollers had just been taken out, a look taken straight from Vivienne’s childhood,” describes Jane Mulvagh in ‘Vivienne Westwood - An Unfashionable Life’.

Whilst he’d created many catwalk hair looks for Westwood in the 80s, Keith Wainwright was about far more than sausage curls. As @andrewlogansculptor has been remembering on Instagram, he was a fixture of the counterculture. Creating host/hostess hair for Logan’s Alternative Miss World for many years, he was also (according to Wikipedia) the first hairdresser to be credited on an album sleeve with Roxy Music’s eponymous debut album and he did all the hair for the Derek Jarman films Sebastiane, Jubilee and The Tempest. Wainwright started his career, like so many other hairdressing icons, with Leonard in 1965. His own salon, Smile, opened in Knightsbridge in 1969 and in 1984 he relocated to Chelsea. He was also renowned for pioneering what we now know as ‘crazy colour’, working with chemists through the 70s - it was eventually popularised by punk in 76 and 77 and after. He undoubtedly befitted the sobriquet ‘legend’. RIP Keith.