Sir James Dyson on the secret to a smart haircut in your 70s
Sir James Dyson first came to London from Norfolk in the mid-1960s as a student at the Royal College of Art. “Just up the road from here,” he points. We are at Larry King’s hair salon in South Kensington where the inventor and entrepreneur is about to have his hair cut.
Thirty odd years before he launched the company that revolutionised how a whole range of household essentials (from vacuum cleaners to hairdryers) work, Dyson was prioritising his hairstyle. “[It was very expensive]. I don’t know what I was doing there, but I went to Leonard’s off Grosvenor Road,” he reveals (Leonard of London was Vidal Sassoon’s dapper colleague and the celebrity snipper that helped to launch Twiggy’s career). “I had hair down to my shoulders, flared trousers and tight flowered shirts. I got my trousers made for £3 at Kensington Market,” he reminisces. Today, Dyson’s clothes are cut from more discerning cloth – he wears designers Dries Van Noten, Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake.
He describes his style as casual, but not “pigeonholeable”. “I’m very lucky because my son-in-law and daughter are fashion designers and have a shop called Couverture and The Garbstore in Westbourne Grove. He gets quite original men’s clothes, mostly from Japan.”
If Dyson has one bugbear, it’s denim. “I never wear jeans,” he says. But he does wear trainers (mostly Reebok) and is experimental with colour. While the former art student takes an interest in fashion, he doesn’t believe it’s necessary to succeed. “No one has ever commented on what I wear”, he says.
Though he does concede that the right work wardrobe matters. “When I first started employing lots of people, I told them not to wear jackets and ties to the office,” he says. “I wanted people to wear what they wear at home, because we make things for people in the home.”
77-year-old Dyson takes his haircut seriously, visiting King every four to six weeks for a restyle. King is Dyson’s UK ambassador and cuts the hair of numerous celebrities including Jared Leto, David Gandy and Niall Horan. Dyson is neither a model nor a pop star, but he’s just as open to change.
“Looking through images of haircuts is our starting point,” explains King (for today’s haircut the actor Adrian Brody is an inspiration). Since seeing King, Dyson has grown his hair longer than usual. “That’s Larry’s influence, I used to have it quite short,” he tells me. “We take a bit off the back and the sides so it looks tidy. But I leave the top longer for him to style it to the side and wear it back,” explains King. “The idea is to keep it smart but not so short that it looks harsh.”
Style is important but hair health is Dyson’s obsession. It’s a point he emphasised to a packed room (myself included) at Paris’s La Gaîté Lyrique earlier this year when unveiling the Airstrait, a hair styling tool that dries and straightens from wet, replacing the need for damaging hot plates.
When I probe into his wellness regime, he is mindfully on brand. “I protect the scalp by not overheating it,” he says, alluding to the damage-reducing Supersonic hairdryer, and its successor, the Supersonic R, a smaller, lighter upgrade designed with the world’s smallest heater.
Passionate as ever, he has brought the parts with him to show me. “It was very difficult to do,” he says of the invention that took nine years to come to fruition. This is Dyson all over. Fastidious and unrelenting at solving complex engineering problems, then presenting them in intuitive simple designs that are endlessly copied but never quite as good.
Has he always had good hair? He accepts my compliment but confesses that age has taken its toll. “I take iron pills because my hair is thinning a bit,” he says. Day to day, he uses Watermans Grow Me Shampoo, and believes that diet plays a vital role in hair and scalp health. “I eat a lot of vegetables and fatty fish,” he says, unafraid to admit that he works on maintaining his looks. “As you get older your skin gets drier – I use a face cream and body cream – it’s probably all snake oil but I take every precaution.”
One precaution includes seeing Dr Conal Perrett, a consultant dermatologist, on Harley Street, where he had his sun spots cryogenically removed on the doctor’s recommendation. “Sun damage only begins to show decades later,” he says. As sun damage is the main cause of skin ageing, Perret is strict on him shunning the sun. He wears SPF50 regularly. “He doesn’t like it when I have a sun tan,” he jests.
As for the future, Dyson farming is his major focus. A vast operation that grows organic out-of-season strawberries by harnessing technological innovation from drones and robots that abolish the need for toxic chemicals, Dyson Farm strawberries are stocked in M&S each year from the end of September. This reduces the fruit’s carbon footprint by preventing the need to import from abroad. But providing the nation with year-round crops isn’t the end goal. “There’s a reason for the farm,” Dyson says, hinting that the connection lies in his thriving beauty business.
Whether it’s there to grow ingredients for an expanding haircare line (the first two styling products launched in August) or something entirely new, he won’t say. Whatever it is, as long as Dyson is chief engineer, we can expect the unexpected.
Four grooming heroes for full and healthy hair in your 70s
Supersonic r™ Professional Hair Dryer, £374.99, Dyson
Chitosan Post-style serum, £49, Dyson
Grow Me Shampoo, £13.95, Waterman’s
Iron and Vitamin Tablets, £13.99, Floradix
