HAIR WORKS NOTES

In the last piece, I wrote about Paris. Effilage. The art of the invisible cut. The French school’s way of following the hair’s natural movement rather than imposing a form upon it.

Today, we cross the Atlantic.

The place is New York. The era, the 1970s through the 1980s. There, too, was a hairdresser who refused to cut wet hair — arriving at dry cutting by an entirely different route, through an entirely different philosophy, than anything happening in Paris.

His name was John Sahag.

The Hairdresser as Sculptor

John Sahag (1952–2005). Born Sahag Jamgotchian to Armenian parents in Beirut, Lebanon. He began sweeping floors in a salon as a young child, and later emigrated to Australia.

At eighteen, he went to Paris. There he met Bernard Mérillat, a prominent salon owner, and signed a six-year contract. At that same point — at eighteen — his first editorial work appeared in Italian Vogue.

Over the next twelve years, moving between Paris and New York, he developed and refined his dry-cutting technique. In 1985, he opened the John Sahag Workshop on Madison Avenue in New York City.

Brooke Shields cut the opening ribbon. The New York Times called him “the rock star of his industry.” And yet, Tracy Ullman and Gwyneth Paltrow sat in the same waiting room as someone who had come in from Queens. The last client of the day was always handed a glass of champagne.

Why Cut Dry?

The core of Sahag’s philosophy can be stated in one line.

“Wet hair is lying to you.”

When hair is soaked, it bundles together and compresses flat. Its natural growth pattern, curl pattern, weight, movement — all of it is hidden. To cut in that state, Sahag believed, was to draft a blueprint on top of a lie.

Cut dry, and everything is visible as it actually is: curl pattern, volume, growth direction, natural movement. “What you see is what you get.”

A colleague described his approach as “not paint by numbers — sketching a haircut freehand.”

The Technique — Two Hours of Sculpture

Sahag’s process went like this.

Shampoo first, then blow-dry completely. Then divide into small sections — units that follow the hair’s natural “grain.” Each section is straightened with an iron to reveal the hair’s “true state.” Then: vertical tapering with the scissors. No horizontal blunt cutting across the top. Always following the hair’s natural flow.

This is repeated for every single subsection.

One cut takes approximately two hours. Sometimes more. The work is as precise as a sculptor removing material from stone.

The result has distinctive qualities. Because every subsection is individually calculated and tapered, the strands interlock naturally and produce a weightless, gravity-defying movement. And the durability is remarkable — the shape holds for three to six months without a salon visit. No styling required. Every day, the hair falls back into its correct position on its own. (Or so it was said. In practice… a slight exaggeration, perhaps — but the difference compared to a conventional cut is real, and it shows.)

The names attached to his most recognized work are familiar ones. Demi Moore (the boyish crop in Ghost, 1990). Gwyneth Paltrow (the cropped style in Sliding Doors, 1998). Brad Pitt. Mick Jagger. Work photographed by Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn.

Paris and New York — An Unexpected Connection

Here I want to note something important, linking back to the previous article.

Bernard Mérillat — the salon owner Sahag met in Paris at eighteen — worked with both L’Oréal and Maniatis. And Sahag himself, later in his career, freelanced for Maniatis collections in New York, Paris, and Milan.

Which means: Maniatis was a place where both effilage and the New York dry-cut school had simultaneous connections. Two distinct techniques, two distinct lineages — both passing through the same house at roughly the same moment.

In the same-era Paris, the two approaches had brushed against each other without fully meeting.

The Bridge to Japan — Eiji Yamane

After Sahag died in 2005 at fifty-three, the technique lived on. The central figure in bringing it to Japan was Eiji Yamane.

Born in Fukuoka, Japan, Yamane apprenticed for four-and-a-half years under celebrated Japanese stylist Michiko Masui, then moved to America without speaking English. He trained for four years under Sam Kopper before being introduced to John Sahag.

Sahag recognized his ability immediately and brought him into the Workshop. His clientele came to include Catherine Zeta-Jones, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Yoko Ono.

And then he returned to Japan, repeatedly, for over twelve years of continuous seminars across the country. Through his educational organization WORKS NYDC (New York Dry Cut), salons practicing New York dry cutting took root in Tokyo, Yokohama, Fukui, Fukuoka, and elsewhere. In Japan, it has established itself as a premium service — at price points ranging from roughly ¥7,000 to ¥40,000 or more per cut.

The Same Dry Cut, Different Philosophies

Before closing, it’s worth pausing to compare the two dry-cut approaches side by side.

Maniatis and Sahag both place dry hair at the center of their work — but their approaches are distinct.

Maniatis: working as closely as possible with the hair’s natural flow and movement — treating the material as it is — then dry resculpting. Extremely fine sections, cut with the tip of the scissors. Client standing, to read the full body.

Sahag: entirely dry, start to finish. Curling iron to reveal each section’s true state, then vertical tapering.

The former is following the material. The latter is liberating the material’s truth. The philosophical starting points are similar, but the technical forms they arrived at are different things.

And both — from fundamentally opposite directions — begin where Sassoon ends. The blueprint comes last, or not at all.

And Now — What Is Happening in San Francisco

When I began writing this series, there was one thing I wanted to make clear.

In the twentieth century, two distinct dry-cut techniques emerged in two different cities, through two different philosophies. Today, the direct inheritors of both lineages work side by side in the same salon in San Francisco.

The French lineage: Maniatis Paris → buyout, founding of agence21 (KENZO) → agence21 Japan academy → studied there (first cohort), emigrated to the US

The New York lineage: John Sahag → Eiji Yamane → Michiaki (owner-stylist, Hair Caffe)

Michiaki inherited New York dry cutting directly from Eiji Yamane. And now, in the same salon — Hair Caffe, San Francisco — the two of us practice these two techniques in a single space.

Why I Wrote This Series

Most hairdressers believe that the technique they know is the whole of cutting. I was one of them. And that’s understandable — even now, in an age of near-total internet access, the information simply doesn’t exist. It took real effort to piece together the research behind this series. But this lineage is too important to hairdressing history to leave scattered and unseen. It deserves to be preserved somewhere visible.

The geometry Sassoon built in London. The effilage that deepened in Paris. The dry cutting Sahag developed in New York. Each was born in the same twentieth century, each arrived at a completely different answer to the same question: how do you leave hair in its best possible state? Each one the result of someone engaging with that question more seriously than anyone else — struggling with it, living it — and arriving somewhere different.

This isn’t a story about which one is right. All of them are real. All of them are deep.

But no matter how high your ambitions, if you don’t know something exists, you can’t choose it.

The intersection of two historically significant dry-cut lineages — that intersection exists right now in San Francisco, at Hair Caffe. And what Michiaki and I are doing, working with these two techniques under one roof, is something still in motion. The new form is maturing, here, right now. That is what is happening as this series closes.

Every technique is still evolving, right now, as you read this.

And here’s what I want anyone reading this to understand. I believe the hairdressing industry is heading toward a sharp divide. The spread of AI and advances in technology mean that automation and robotics cannot be ruled out in our field. If that happens, the techniques that can’t be replicated by data, that no one else can imitate — the ones that are genuinely exceptional — will only grow in value and demand. For hairdressers who have nothing to distinguish themselves beyond average technique, I predict the road ahead will be brutal. Especially in Japan, where competition is already fierce.

If this article found you by accident — and it helps you build a brighter career, a better future, by your own hand — that would make me happier than I can say.

“Three Schools of Haircutting” — Complete
→ #1 Geometry and Liberation — How Vidal Sassoon Changed the World with a Pair of Scissors
→ #2 The Art of the Invisible Cut — Effilage and the French School of Haircutting
→ #3 Haircut as Sculpture — New York Dry Cutting and the Street Where Two Schools Met（本稿）

Note: If you are mentioned in this article and wish to request any corrections or removal, please get in touch.

→ 日本語版はこちら

In the last piece, I wrote about Sassoon. Blueprint first. Establish the perimeter, build with geometric precision, finish with wash-and-wear. An architect’s approach. Maximum tension on wet hair to produce a perfect line.

And I wrote this:

“Within the same twentieth century, another pole existed. Approaches that begin not with a blueprint, but with the material itself — that try to read what the hair is before deciding what to do with it.”

That other pole is what I want to talk about today.

The place is Paris. The era, the 1970s.

What the French Hairdressers Were Looking At

French aesthetic thinking started from a fundamentally different premise than Sassoon’s.

If the British School says “make the material conform to the form,” the French School says “follow the growth pattern and the movement.” One sentence, and it explains everything.

There was a man named Jean-Marc Maniatis. Born in 1942. He began his career while still a teenager as a studio hairdresser for ELLE and Marie Claire, and in 1970 opened his own salon in Paris’s 16th arrondissement.

He said this:

“I don’t teach my apprentices hairstyling. I teach them to see — apprendre à regarder.”

This single line goes to the heart of the French school’s philosophy. Look first. Read first. The design comes later — or sometimes never fully resolves until the very end.

His approach is called top-down. He treated the head as a three-dimensional sculptural object, observing the skull structure, facial features, hair density, and natural growth patterns directly as he cut. Like a painter facing a canvas, he worked from the top down, layering “like roof tiles,” with the perimeter line determined last.

And Maniatis often cut with his clients standing up. Not to see the head alone, but to read the whole body — its proportions, its structure, its posture.

What Effilage Is — The Technique of the Invisible Layer

There is a technique that embodies this philosophy. It’s called effilage.

The word comes from the French effiler — to thin, to taper. In English-speaking contexts it’s often described as slithering or slide-cutting.

In one line: you slide the half-open scissors along the length of a section of hair. That’s all.

But the effect runs deeper than it looks.

Where blunt cutting creates clear cut ends and weight lines, effilage creates invisible layers. It reduces bulk naturally without significantly changing the overall length. The ends taper like the tip of a brush. The hair blends into itself, and a seamless, fluid movement is born.

The result looks like: “this is just how it was.” Like nothing was done.

The cut is invisible.

Jean-Louis David took this a step further in 1970, combining effilage with a systematic graduated layer structure — the dégradé — and establishing the modern idea of “cutting to create movement.” The aesthetic of hair in dynamic motion, hair that seems alive in the wind — the work he produced alongside Helmut Newton came from here.

Jacques Dessange refined this further still, crystallizing it into a concept he called coiffé-décoiffé — literally, “styled and unstyled.” Technically, it combines a radial taper from the crown with a square base, designed so that the moment the hair falls out of perfect arrangement, something like vitality enters it.

“A cut only comes alive when a woman moves her head. The hair must be ready to follow.”

The Moment I Saw It

What follows is personal.

A few years into my career as a hairdresser, I encountered effilage for the first time. Encountered it — or rather, watched it happen in front of me.

The only word I had was: shock.

Something completely different from everything I’d learned was happening. After the cut, no “cut shape” remained. In the finished result, there was no evidence of where the scissors had been. And yet the hair moved with a lightness that was almost unbelievable. It looked untouched. And it was arranged.

If I’m honest, my first reaction was just: what is happening here? Technical understanding came later. The sensory impact arrived first.

The Buyout, and the Birth of agence21

To explain how effilage eventually found its way to me, I have to start with a specific event.

2009. A group called Provalliance acquired the Maniatis salon network. Provalliance. At the time, Maniatis operated four salons in France, and approximately twenty salons in Japan.

In the wake of the acquisition, a Japanese hairdresser who had held a leading position at the Paris Maniatis salon left.

That person was KENZO.

KENZO went on to establish a creative collective called agence21 (アジャンス・ヴァン・テ・アン). And he launched an academy to teach effilage — a technique that had been kept inside Maniatis — to hairdressers outside the salon. In simple words, that doesn’t sound like much. But it was extraordinary. That technique — those magical, near-incomprehensible scissors movements — was being released into the world.

In the early days, there were rights-related issues, and the term “effilage cut” couldn’t be used directly for a time. During that period, the academy operated under the name coupe 3D. Those restrictions have since been resolved, and the name effilage is now freely used. When I started training, the academy was still operating under the coupe 3D name.

My Teachers

KENZO brought the academy to Japan as well.

I was in the first cohort of students — I received cut training directly from senior agence21 staff.

There is another person I can’t leave out.

KEIGO. When Maniatis expanded from Paris to Japan, KEIGO was one of the core stylists sent over. It’s said that within the Japanese Maniatis operation, KEIGO was effectively the only person who could perform effilage with full accuracy. I received cut training directly from him as well.

Learning from both of them was a turning point in my career as a hairdresser.

I should add: beyond KENZO and KEIGO, there are hairdressers in Japan who have their own connections to agence21 and carry on the effilage lineage. The transmission of this technique isn’t limited to two people.

Where Effilage Can Still Be Learned — Places That Exist in Japan Right Now

agence21 is still active.

In Japan it operates under the name VINGT ET UN (ヴァン・テ・ユン).

・agence21 Japan (VINGT ET UN): https://www.agence21.info/

Also in the same building — 1-7-3 Iidabashi, Chiyoda-ku — is chardon.

・chardon: https://www.chardon21.net/

KENZO’s salon VINGT ET UN is at the same address.

There’s one more person worth mentioning.

Yotsumoto, owner of real clothes in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo. He received training directly from KENZO in Paris — which, when you consider how few people today are in a position to have done that, means something.

・real clothes (Shimokitazawa): https://www.0334662608.com/

There is also Brut in Seijo, Tokyo — another salon connected to KEIGO.

・Brut (Seijo): https://www.brut21.com/

These salons are places where a living transmission is still happening. If you’re in Japan, effilage can still be learned in its living form. Whether that will still be true in ten years — honestly, I don’t know. The time the masters have to actively pass this on is finite. I want to say that as directly as I can.

Sassoon and the French School — Two Definitions of Reproducibility

The French School also pursues reproducibility. But what that word means is entirely different from Sassoon’s.

Sassoon’s reproducibility: reproduce the geometric precision exactly, every time. The French School’s reproducibility: return naturally, every day, to where the hair wants to fall according to its own movement and gravity.

The former is the reproduction of a design. The latter is the release of the material’s potential — a return to where it naturally lands.

“If a hairstyle has a name, it’s probably not the right one for you.” — Jean-Marc Maniatis

A cut without a name. A form that belongs only to this one person.

“Three Schools of Haircutting”
→ #1 Geometry and Liberation — How Vidal Sassoon Changed the World with a Pair of Scissors
→ #2 The Art of the Invisible Cut — Effilage and the French School of Haircutting（本稿）
→ #3 Haircut as Sculpture — New York Dry Cutting and the Street Where Two Schools Met

Note: If you are mentioned in this article and wish to request any corrections or removal, please get in touch.

→ 日本語版はこちら

London, 1950s. For women who visited the salon, the week had a rhythm.

Shampoo, roller set, sit under a massive dome dryer for over an hour, seal with lacquer. Next week, repeat. An endless cycle. A hairstyle was something you maintained. A hairdresser was someone who held a shape in place.

Then someone came along and changed what that could mean.

Vidal Sassoon (1928–2012). Born in London’s East End, raised in an orphanage, and apprenticed to a hairdresser at fourteen.

Sassoon’s Reference Point Was Architecture

When Sassoon launched his revolution, the ideas behind it came from an unexpected source: the philosophy of design and architecture.

Bauhaus. A school that existed in Germany from 1919 to 1933, it left an outsized mark on how the twentieth century thought about design and building. Its core tenet: strip away the unnecessary, and fuse function with geometric form. Sassoon took that philosophy and applied it directly to the human head.

His core thesis could be stated in a single line.

“Shape before Style.”

If the cut is right, you don’t need rollers or hairspray. The hair falls into its correct form on its own. Wash it, dry it. Done.

Conversely — and this was a fairly direct indictment of the beauty industry at the time — all the setting and spraying to “maintain” a style was only necessary because the cut itself was never properly designed to begin with.

1963: The Five-Point Cut

The most dramatic proof of that thesis was the Five-Point Cut, created in 1963 on model Grace Coddington. Five sharp V-lines, structured to emphasize the eyes, cheekbones, and jawline. Sassoon himself described it as “the most pure and classical form of geometric design.”

Coddington later recalled: “Nothing has ever beaten that cut. And it freed everybody. They could just let it dry naturally and shake their heads.”

Break it down technically, and Sassoon’s approach had a clear architectural skeleton.

Bottom-up construction — establish the perimeter line first, then work inward, calibrating weight as you go. The finished form is mapped before the first cut is made. Wet hair under tension maximizes geometric precision. Blunt cutting creates sharp lines and distinct edges. The ABC classification system he developed — A = one-length, B = graduation, C = layering — gave the industry a shared vocabulary. Precise sectioning and cross-checking brought the margin of error close to zero.

The blueprint comes first. Then you build it on a human head. It’s an architect’s way of thinking.

“Wash and Wear” as Social Statement

The Five-Point Cut wasn’t only a technical achievement.

It freed women from the weekly ritual of being confined under a dome dryer. “Hair that works after washing and drying” — the wash-and-wear concept resonated with the second-wave feminism already moving through the 1960s. This appeared in the same decade, the same city, as Mary Quant’s miniskirt. That was probably not a coincidence. Quant said of Sassoon: “He freed us, just as much as the pill and the mini.”

This was the moment a haircut became a symbol of an era.

Watching Sassoon’s Legacy from North America

I’ve been working as a hairdresser in San Francisco for over eight years now.

Something becomes clear in this environment. Here in California, just as in Japan, the overwhelming majority of stylists were trained on a Sassoon-based curriculum. Bottom-up sectioning, wet precision line-building — this framework still functions as the industry standard. Most cosmetology school curricula, for better or worse, are built on the architecture Sassoon designed.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Geometric precision gives a cut strength and reproducibility.

And this — this is still what makes me believe Sassoon’s contribution was one of the great inventions in the history of the craft — above all else, it’s teachable. Easy to teach, easy to learn. The impact that single quality has had on the hairdressing industry is enormous. Enormous.

But after twenty-nine years in this trade, what I keep coming back to is that this “blueprint-first” way of thinking is one pole of the full spectrum of haircut philosophy. Within the same twentieth century, another pole existed. A genuinely different one. Most hairdressers I’ve encountered don’t know about it. And because they don’t know it exists, there’s no choice to make.

I used to be one of them.

There are approaches that begin not with a blueprint, but with the material itself — approaches that try to read what the hair is before deciding what to do with it. The design emerges afterward, or sometimes not until the very end.

Those other schools grew in Paris and New York, in different forms.

That’s where this series goes next.

“Three Schools of Haircutting”
→ #1 Geometry and Liberation — How Vidal Sassoon Changed the World with a Pair of Scissors（本稿）
→ #2 The Art of the Invisible Cut — Effilage and the French School of Haircutting
→ #3 Haircut as Sculpture — New York Dry Cutting and the Street Where Two Schools Met

→ 日本語版はこちら