Martyn Duff was born in a small village in Yorkshire and was destined for life as a miner. However, after eight months working at the coalface he told his parents he wanted to be a hairdresser instead.
As he tells it, “It was all very Billy Elliot. My dad went berserk and shouted, ‘No son of mine will do a job like that!’”, but Martyn refused to be dissuaded and trained as a barber at “a typical unisex salon in Leeds”. But every time I went into the city I was intrigued by Sassoon. I saw all this stuff going on in the salon and loved what they were about. Their image really drew me. Sassoon was it. Martyn retrained at that very salon in 1980 and ended up in Manchester, where he stayed for eight years. “It was the Hacienda years, very happening, very exciting. I did Morrissey’s hair in my kitchen.” | In 1988 he became Creative Director in Toronto, then Boston, and in 2001 New York, and is now responsible for all East Coast work. Martyn’s job, as he sees it, is “to inspire, to guide, to educate, to help people choose the right career path, to make sure everybody has a good grounding and shares the same quality of vision, from assistant level to stylist.”
He finds his greatest inspiration in “surrounding myself with wonderful friendships and living in such a beautiful city as New York. Just walking to work from the Lower East Side through Alphabet City to the downtown salon makes me see all kinds of hair, from grunge to city fashionista – anything goes.”
And his father? “He loved it in the end. He was so proud of me, he made sure everyone knew what I was doing. It was like having CNN planted in the village.” |
