Hairstylist Sam McKnight Talks About His Book, His Career, and How to Make it in the Fashion Industry

You may not realize it, but Sam McKnight has probably influenced the way your hair looked at some point in your life. Over the past forty years, the Scottish-born hairstylist has cut and coiffed the hair of some of the most famous women in the world, style and beauty icons like Kate Moss, Princess Diana, Madonna, and Lady Gaga. He’s worked for the most prestigious fashion houses in Europe (Chanel, Fendi, Burberry, to name a few), and he’s been featured in every major fashion and beauty magazine you can imagine (including multiple appearances in Allure dating back to as early as 1992). He may not own a salon, or have his own line of products (although, fingers crossed he’s considering the latter), but McKnight is arguably one of the most important, most influential people in the hair and fashion industry of the past four decades. And never has that been more clear than today, when his book, Hair by Sam McKnight, officially goes on sale on Amazon, followed by an exhibition at Somerset House in London starting November 2nd. “It’s not really a hair book,” McKnight said to me during fashion week in Milan. “It’s a reference book of hair and fashion over the past forty years through my eyes and my hands. It’s my story.” Which is why I wanted to let McKnight tell his own tale of how this book came to be.

Laspata Decaro

On why he wanted to do a book.

“I was so fed up carrying around forty years worth of magazines and tear sheets. They've been with me in every house, in every apartment, and when I moved into my current home five years ago, the amount of space they were taking up was ridiculous. I said, I'm not doing this again, it’s going on digital, and the woman who was doing the digital archive for me happened to work for Somerset House. She showed my archive to them and that was the catalyst for them wanting to do the exhibition with me. I had been talking with people about doing a book for a while—the same people at Rizzoli who did Kate Moss’s book—but we hadn’t decided what it should be. After meeting with Somerset House, I realized, Okay, the book should be an archive of the past 40 years. Having said all that, I kept the papers and the magazines. They’re just in storage now.”

On what you’ll find inside.

“It’s a chronology of my work, starting at the beginning when I was working in New York City in the 1980s. To tell that story the chapters are broken up by looks and styles that have become my trademarks over the years, as well as the major influences throughout my career like Kate Moss, Karl Lagerfeld, Princess Diana, and the collaborations backstage at fashion shows. The pictures are a mix of my own personal photos, professionally-shot photos from backstage, and my editorial work. For the editorial images, I tried to include some that haven’t been overexposed. It’s hard with Google now, but I did try to throw in a few things you wouldn’t find searching the Internet.”

Courtesy of Nick Knight

The biggest challenge of making a book.

“The hardest part was the beginning, when I was like, How on earth do we put this together? Once I got over that, the hardest part was letting go of the images we couldn’t include because there was just not room. It was so hard narrowing down the nearly 40,000 editorial images because there are so many good ones and it feels like you’re losing a child when you edit them out. As for the personal photos, that was easy. I’d just look at them and say, No, too fat in this one, too old in that one.”

Glen Luchford

On how he got into the industry.

“When I was 18 or 19, I was in college, training to be a teacher. But I was bored. My friends in Scotland owned a hair salon, as well as a restaurant and a disco, which were all in the same complex. I tried to DJ. I tried to work in the restaurant, but I was no good. I found myself helping out at the salon, sweeping up and driving the van, and then one day I tried blow-drying hair and thought, Well, I could do this. It really was by accident. Some people are very serious about their career path. Me, still to this day, I have no big plan. I take it as it comes.”

Jem Mitchell

On his big break.

“My first cover shoot for British Vogue in 1977 with photographer Eric Bowman. I was terrified. But it was also the moment when I realized that this is what I want to do—I don’t want to work in a salon. I guess you'd consider it my big break because they kept calling me again and again afterwards. I lasted two more years at the salon I was working at in London and then I moved to New York where I got straight into shooting with American Vogue and Irving Penn and Bruce Weber. There was work every day, every evening, trips to the Caribbean. Not that I knew it back then, but it was the golden age of fashion photography.”

Patrick Demarchelier

On the biggest lesson he's learned over the years.

"Too keep my mouth shut. Not at all times, but learning that it's not all about you. Because in the beginning, I thought it was all about me, which I think everyone does when they're young. So learning when it's the right time to speak up and when it's just best to stay quiet. The other big lesson I've learned is that you can be really talented, incredibly gorgeous, but if it's not your time, it's not going to happen. Like everything in life, it's all about timing."

Watch top models and designers in the industry talk about what makes Sam McKnight so special:

On how the hair and fashion industry has changed.

"There is so much demand for change these days, and expectation to change, which is different from the past when change happened as a spontaneous reaction to something, when change happened as a natural progression, an evolution. I think there is a lot of pressure for change now, just with all the [fashion] collections that have to be done and the internet in general. I know a lot of people myself included, are bored with that and are wanting to take more time to concentrate on their work. But I'm rambling. The other way the hair industry has changed is the modern products and modern tools. The technologies have come leaps and bounds since I started doing hair and that has what has helped us do all these crazy things we do, ten times a day, backstage at the shows or on set. Twenty years ago, for example, if you put grease in a model's hair for the first fashion show of the day, she has greasy hair for two weeks. Now, you can have grease products that are water-soluble so that they just wash out quickly, and because we have so many dry [styling] products, we now don't even have to wet a girl's hair to get a change. We have products that allow us to make fast changes, but fast changes that don't compromise the health of the hair."

On the Somerset House exhibition.

“It's not an exhibition of the book. It’s similar, and some of my work will be on display, but the exhibition is more about showing the cultural context of hair and fashion over the past 40 years. Shona Marshall, the curator at Somerset House, also felt that people want to see what they can’t see on Google, so we’re exposing the process of creating a hairstyle for a photoshoot or fashion show and the collaboration that goes into it. One of the first exhibits is one of our kit bags, we’ve built what looks like a backstage area, and we’ve recreated some of the looks from past shows on wigs, so it’s whole process. For me, it’s a way to highlight the hairdressing trade. The hairdressing trade is always thought of by the public as salons. But that’s not what we do, so this helps explains that. I also hope it will help give inspiration to young people who want to get into the business.”

Patrick Demarchelier

On including Princess Diana in his book.

“I still don’t talk too much about my time with Diana. And the chapter in the book isn't a tell-all or me divulging any secrets. I just put my favorite pictures of her along with a couple of funny little stories that I’ve told before. You know what, it was a hugely important part of my career. For me, I got to see places and things and meet people through that relationship that I would never, in a million years, have done if I hadn’t been a hairdresser. It was because of my trade all of that stuff happened and that’s kind of what I’m saying with the book and the exhibition: That when you have a trade like this, there is no limit to the possibilities.”

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