In Conversation With an Icon Garren

NATHANIEL HAWKINS: WHEN DID YOU FIRST REALIZE THAT YOU HAD A TALENT FOR HAIR?

GARREN: I was just obsessed with hair at the age of 13. My mother used to go to the beauty salon and, being that she was prematurely gray in her thirties, they would send her home with the Queen Elizabeth hairstyle—all little waves and dips. I would brush it all out and tease it up because I wanted her to look like Elizabeth Taylor or Catherine Deneuve or any of those famous movie stars that I adored back in the day.

 

NH: IS THAT HOW YOU DEVELOPED A SALON FOR YOUR MOTHER AND HER FRIENDS?

G: I did my mom; then all her girlfriends from the PTA wanted to know who did her hair. She told them, “You’re not going to believe it.” Before you knew it, every Friday night after school and all day Saturday, I'd go from house to house, blowing out, setting, teasing and cutting hair, because I had read those little books they used to sell in the grocery store that showed you the “after” picture and how-to. So I was doing hair by Kenneth—I thought I was—and cutting hair like Sassoon. My father then built me a little salon in the basement, with hooded dryers and all that kind of stuff. At 16, I went to beauty school at night with my sister and my aunt because I was too young to drive to Buffalo [from Niagara Falls]. That was Doyle’s Beauty Academy. 

There was a big moment in 10th grade, which is when you go to your student counselor to find out what you’re going to do when you grow up. I told him, “I am almost through beauty school. I’m going to be a hairdresser.” And he said, “That’s absolutely not going to happen. We’re going to call your father in.” So my father leaves work and comes to the school. The counselor, Mr. McLaughlin—I’ll never forget his name—said to my father, “Okay, Mr. DeFazio, do you know what your son wants to do with his future? He doesn’t want to go to college and he doesn’t want to be a school teacher, he doesn’t want to be an engineer. He wants to be a beautician. That’s what women do." And my father got silent and he looked at me and then at the counselor, and I thought, Oh shit, I’m going to college. And he said, “Mr. McLaughlin, I want to tell you right now: My son is going to be a hairdresser, and he’s going to be really good at it because he’s already really good at it. And someday you might read about him because that’s what he wants to do. End of story.” And that was it.

NH: WHEN YOU LOOK BACK, WHAT WERE THE MOVIES THAT INSPIRED YOU THE MOST AS A HAIRDRESSER?

G: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Suddenly, Last Summer. Belle de Jour. A lot of the Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn movies. It's the characters and how beautiful they were and how they walked across the room. Luckily, during the course of my career, I have been able to kind of relive it through some of the models that I’ve worked on—especially during the nineties and two-thousands, working with Steven Meisel. I was able to pull all my characters out. But when I first started, the people that I used to watch in the magazines were [the hairstylists] Ara Gallant (who worked a lot with Avedon), Harry King and Christiaan Houtenbos. 

NH: CHRISTIAAN WAS A JUDGE IN A COMPETITION YOU HAD ENTERED?

G: Yes, and I won first prize. My ex-wife was my model. Christiaan is the one that even got me into New York. He introduced me to the right people, like John and Suzanne Chadwick, who were creative directors of the Glemby salons. I went and interviewed, and they said, “Well, you live outside Buffalo. We have a salon there. Work there for a couple years, and then we’ll move you to New York.” I was in heaven. I became the style director of that salon, and that’s where I met my now husband, Thom Priano—we’ve been together 50 years, and that’s a miracle on its own. He applied for a job there, and I told the manager, “Hire him, no matter if he can do hair or not, because he’s so damn good-looking that the women will love him.” And, believe it or not, he could do great hair. 

NH: WHAT WAS YOUR PATH INTO MAGAZINES?

G: Thom and I had asked to move, and they placed me at the Glemby salon in Bergdorf Goodman. It was a magnificent salon. They were remodeling the stations, and a new star stylist was coming in. It turned out to be Suga—one of the stylists that I used to watch in Vogue—and I was just like, I want to be this person. I want to figure out how I’m going to do this. Suga and I became very good friends. He would have us out to Fire Island; he would have us over for dinner. I started meeting all these editors, and they began taking me on road trips with Mademoiselle and makeover trips with Glamour. I stopped working at Bergdorf’s, and I started doing Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar. I met the most wonderful mentors that I ever could have met: [sittings editors] Jade Hobson, Polly Mellen, and Phyllis Posnick.

Phyllis is the one who took a chance on using me for a Vogue shoot because Suga couldn’t do the job. As soon as I did that shoot, I was handed off to Polly and Jade. Polly brought me to Mr. Penn’s studio and Avedon’s studio, and Jade brought me to Chris von Wangenheim’s studio and Bill King’s studio. I didn’t realize where I was because it happened within a year. It was just so crazy.

NH: WHAT WAS IT LIKE DOING FARRAH FAWCETT’S HAIR EARLY ON?

G: Along the way, there were people who helped put me on the map. One was Farrah—that was in the seventies. She was known for her hair. When I was working in Buffalo, every woman would come in with the Farrah Fawcett picture of her hair in Charlie's Angels, wanting me to recreate that flippity, flippity flip. So I remember being [on set for Vogue] with Way [Bandy] and Polly and Patrick [Demarchelier], and they wouldn’t tell us who the celebrity was. I said to Way, “I’ll die if it’s Farrah Fawcett.” The knock on the door came, and Way started laughing so hard. It was a two-day shoot, and I said, “Let me curl your hair and make it all wild and big—not flippity.” And she says, “Okay, whatever!” We did all the sexy, fancy clothes, like corsets and all that, with the curly hair. Then the next day I came in and said, “Polly, I really feel like I want to straighten her hair. I want to make her tough, but still all-American.” So Polly pulled out all the men’s suits and put the rack together: cool, big, full pants and tiny little jackets, big shoulders. We didn’t have a flat iron back then, so I put Farrah’s head on the ironing board and ironed her hair out with an iron and tissue paper. It was dead-straight, with a tail hanging in the back. I said, “We could just tuck that in your jacket.” And she said, “No, just cut it off. I like this.” I took the Charlie's Angels out of her. We became very close. She actually took my son on a date on his 16th birthday because I didn't know what to get him. She said, “I’ll pick him up after the theater and take him to dinner. And then you, Thom, and Ryan [O’Neal] meet us at the restaurant to have cake.” That was genius.

 

NH: THERE’S B-ROLL OF YOU DOING FARRAH’S HAIR FOR THE WARHOL SHOOT.

G: She asked, “Do you mind doing my hair for Warhol?” And I was like, “Warhol, of course.” So I blew it out but didn’t want to make it dead-straight, because she was known to have a little wave. I had been around Andy before—of course we all saw him at Studio 54 and all that. But working with him was pretty amazing. He took all these Polaroids and she just went into character. She went into Farrah and he just fell in love with her. We spent the whole afternoon at the Factory, and it was quite the experience. I saw all these Polaroids sitting on the desk, and he’s going, “Pretty neat, huh?”

 

NH: WHAT WERE YOU PICKING UP ON SET?

G: As much as I could. I’d watch the lighting; I’d watch the magic that was happening. Avedon would take one Polaroid, and then he would take six pictures and it was done. Penn would have one light, and he would direct the girl to act like that or see something. Click, click, click, click, it was done. Polly would fluff a blouse or take a collar and stand it up, add an earring or take an earring off. She taught me what to look for: not what looked good, but what looked wrong. I was with masters like Way Bandy, watching how he would sculpt a face. Or Sandy [Linter] doing a lavender eye with a little bit of brown, and realizing that the beige-y pink lip all of a sudden became more important than the hair. I would knock it down or beef it up—whatever was called for. It was always for the picture, not because I wanted to make a statement. 

NH: YOU’VE BEEN RESPONSIBLE FOR SO MANY HAIRSTYLES THAT DEFINED THE CULTURAL MOMENT. IS THERE ONE YOU'RE MOST PROUD OF?

G: I would say the Madonna makeovers. The first time I worked with her was in Paris for Italian Vogue. Steven Meisel called, asking, “Would you do a project with me?” He wanted to make Madonna over, and she wanted to be made over. We wanted to take the club kid out of her. She came in with Gaultier, and we were shooting Azzedine Alaïa and her in bed. I did her like Virna Lisi, and François Nars did her makeup. Later, we did her as Marilyn [for Vanity Fair]. She’d already done that song [“Material Girl”] where she’s playing a very kid-Marilyn. We sophisticated her up. She’s always been a chameleon. She became enveloped in this character of who she was. 

And when Victoria Beckham wanted to cut her hair, I insisted we cut it like a gamine Mia Farrow, because I felt she had such a tiny presence, and she was going to become a fashion designer. Like, get rid of all that other stuff and let’s start fresh. Take it off. She held out in a hotel room for two or three days before the Marc Jacobs show so she could show off her new haircut to the press. And she knocked it out of the park.

NH: IF YOU WERE TO DEFINE A HAIR MOVEMENT THAT YOU’VE HELPED CREATE OVER THE DECADES, WHAT COMES TO MIND?

G: There’s always a place for a new bob. It always makes a statement, no matter if it’s up above your ears, below your chin or down to the collarbone with rocker bangs. It could be clippered all underneath and long on top. I mean, look at Gigi’s hair now in the Miu Miu ads. It’s almost like a 40s finger-wave bob with a little flick on the end. How adorable is that? When I gave Karlie Kloss a really rough, choppy bob [for Vogue], everyone in New York had it for three years.

 

NH: THAT WAS A SENSATION.

G: It was. Karlie cried—and then all of a sudden she realized who she was. Linda [Evangelista] went through this stuff over and over and over again. You have to remember, there was a time when all the supermodels were able to cut their hair. Linda, Amber, and Kristen McMenamy became my muses through Steven Meisel. We were always changing up the color and the haircuts. It’s the way fashion keeps evolving. Linda went through more transformations than, I think, any other model. We sent her to George Michael’s [“Freedom”] video, bleaching her hair the night she left. She said, “Oh, I have to figure out who I am by the time I get to London.” She was the model who would change her hair on a dime without even thinking about it. She would pull in who the character was and become it. 

 

NH: WHAT MAKES A GREAT MODEL?

G: Someone who looks in the mirror, sees what they’re wearing, sees what they look like, and figures out how they can work with it on the set. Sometimes they’re very valid in saying something isn’t working—“I don’t know about this lip, this hair”—and that’s important. But if you have a really good model, she will figure out how to make whatever’s happening work with the photographer. It’s all between her and the lens. There’s got to be a connection. If there’s no connection, it falls flat and it’s just okay. Linda knows how to move every bone in her body, every muscle in her face. She knows where to lean for the light.

People say when they get a model trained by Meisel, their work is almost finished. Steven Klein is another one who teaches the model to do what he wants. As did Avedon, as did Penn. Avedon would have Lauren Hutton do a skip and a hop and he’d take three frames and it was done. Hair flew in the right position because everything was orchestrated.

 

NH: EVERY GREAT ATHLETE HAS A GREAT COACH.

G: Exactly. 

 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.