Picture London in the late 1970s, the streets filled with leather-clad, mohawked youth heralding music’s next big thing: punk rock. Into this torrid scene walks 20-year-old Randy Currie. “I felt like I landed on another planet,” he says. “And it was really cool.”
A recent cosmetology school graduate, Currie was there to learn from Vidal Sassoon, an up-and-coming icon whose styles were based on geometric, precision cuts. At Vidal Sassoon Academy, Currie mastered the system that would become his signature. He met Sassoon, too. “It was like meeting a rock star,” Currie recalls. “He had a dynamic personality. We talked about hair and his philosophy about styling.”
They would chat again 31 years later. “I was in Spain because I was nominated for Beauty Entrepreneur of the Year Award,” says Currie. “I got into an elevator at 7:30 a.m., and there was Vidal Sassoon. I said, ‘Mr. Sassoon, you don’t remember me but I was a student of yours in London in 1975.’ He wished me luck with my career and the award, which I won later that night.”
