Rose Evansky, who has died aged 94, was from the early 1950s to the mid-60s the only woman with a major salon in Mayfair, London, and was a pioneer in the use of the hand-held blow dryer. She regarded her work as a personal service, rather than a vehicle to promote herself. Evansky empathised with her customers, since she knew just how much grooming cost in time and money, especially for women whose hair had natural kinks or curls resistant to smoothing – and she hated the process of straightening hair.
In 1962 she noticed through the window of a nearby barber’s shop that its proprietor was using a powerful new hand-held dryer, in conjunction with a brush, to smooth a man’s hair. Men had never been subjected to the torment of sitting for an hour or more with hair doused in chemicals and yanked on rollers, under a fixed hood of hot air.
Soon afterwards, Evansky was seen trying the technique in her salon, on a Mrs Hay, by the rule-breaking Vogue “Young Ideas” editor Clare Rendlesham, who immediately summoned up publicity for Evansky’s blow-wave – it worked on straight hair, too. Within a year, all Mayfair’s leading stylists offered it. Waving a dryer became part of the drama of their act.
Reaching Mayfair had been an achievement. Rose’s family fled antisemitism in Poland after the first world war to settle in Germany, but under Nazi rule Rose’s father, Max Lerner, was sent to Dachau in 1938. He was released the following year and left for Britain, where he was joined by his wife, his son, Heinie, and Rose. She was 16 and spoke only Yiddish and German when she boarded one of the last kindertransport trains to safety in the UK.
The family found a home in the East End of London, and Rose took an apprenticeship with Adolf Cohen of Whitechapel Road, the “professor” of the hairdressing trade (who also trained Vidal Sassoon). At 20, she married a fellow hairdresser, Albert Evansky. After the war, when “getting your hair done” had become a middle-class norm, the couple opened their first salon, in 1947 in the north London suburb of Hendon.
It was successful enough by 1953 to allow them to rent posher premises in North Audley Street, Mayfair. Their salon was sympathetic to workers as well as clients: Evansky accepted Leonard Lewin, later Leonard of Mayfair, as an apprentice, after the celebrated Freddie French had rejected him because of his rough background.
Evansky’s hand blow-drying displeased her husband, who complained: “Have you gone mad? We’ve just bought 20 new hood dryers. What shall we do with them? Throw them out?” (The salon kept a few for high-dressed, lacquered styles, and older clients.) The marital relationship was failing.
Evansky disliked the way fashionable hairdressing was becoming about flamboyant male stylists who wanted only young clients and often cut their hair without regard for their identity or feelings.
She had made friends through clients, among them the playwright and script-doctor Denis Cannan; after both had divorced their spouses, they married in 1965, and by the end of the decade Evansky had left hairdressing to live with him in the Sussex countryside.
They returned to London for a while, then retired to Hove, East Sussex. After she was noticed at the launch of a book by another 1960s hairdresser, and interviewed by radio and fashion press, she wrote a memoir, In Paris We Sang (2013).
Cannan died in 2011.
• Rose Evansky Cannan, hair stylist, born 30 May 1922; died 22 November 2016
