MILLION DOLLAR SAM

Wind Machines & Hot Air... Sam McKnight, Because Magazine, first published 2014

Chanel, Dior, Vogue, Kate and Diana – names and brands so big that one word is enough; and for the most iconic and recognized images, you want one man doing the hair: Sam McKnight.

He launched his brand : Hair by Sam McKnight at LFW AW 2017… Cool Girl was inspired by the Original Cool Girl… and first quote here… Kate…

“Stories...there are so many,” says Kate Moss.

“No one can work a wind machine like Sam McKnight…”

In September 2014 McKnight was honored with Creative Head’s Hair Icon award, and was also presented with Session Hairdresser of the year for the third time running. He has lost count of the number of covers he has worked on (British Vogue puts the count at over 80). His (now) 237K followers on Instagram know him better for dahlias, roses, and his sense of humour.

“The way Sam sees a flower is the way he sees hair,” explains Amanda Harlech, collaboratrice in 2014 at Chanel and Fendi. “I love him. Sam is passionate, curious, always experimenting and creating. He’s a genius but humble about it – the funniest man on the shoot and terrifyingly tireless!”

Mcknight is sitting in his garden, with a mug of tea, enjoying the last rays of the summer sun with his flowers in full-bloom and the leaves not quite ready to fall. It is the last moment of calm before the fashion week storm. “I fell into doing this by accident,” he says of a career that has taken him around the world, landing coveted billboards and covers. He tries to stay out of the spotlight though however discreet, you might spy him with Gisele in Dolce and Gabbana’s advert for The One and recognize his deep velvet voice over or have seen his cameo role as Mme, Chanel’s favourite butler in Lagerfeld’s short-film The Return. It’s a long way from his teacher training days. “Oh, I didn’t really like that,” he says. “I was in Scotland and it was David Bowie and glam rock time and the college was full of hippies.” It was then he discovered hair. “My friends owned a hairdressing salon, joined to a disco and a burger restaurant, that felt so glamorous I ended up there, did a few odd jobs at the weekend and slowly I fell into working in the hair salon… and that was it.”

A couple of holidays to London later “in the thick of Biba and change” he moved South as “there was this undercurrent of magic which was very, very apparent.” Fashion, or more accurately Vogue, was what inspired him. “We had old Vogue magazines in our school library and I fell in love with Norman Parkinson pictures, Twiggy, Jerry Hall and Marie Helvin. Doing hair was a tiny little part of that, and when I got to London I realised I wanted to be even more part of that.” He worked at a few different salons and, having studied all the Vogues, “I could see Molton Brown was the salon that were doing all the covers and I took it upon myself to apply for a job.” Molton Brown was on South Molton Street, frequented and favoured by editors and founded by the Burstein family along with their boutique Browns. “Sam had a strong impact from the day he started,” says Caroline Burstein, creative director at Browns. “He had natural talent and great charm in equal doses. My then husband Michael did not like doing session work for magazines and so would put Sam forward to represent us.” “I kind of retrained with them,” Mcknight explains, “I learnt their way of doing things which was very natural… they taught me how to use my hands more than tools which I am very grateful for.” By the end of the seventies he was spending more time doing session work than in the salon.

Of his early days Mcknight explains that “our business didn’t really exist, not like today, it was very small. Yes, there were big designers, like YSL but they were small, this was before London Fashion Week existed and the shows in Paris and Milan were only beginning to become more publicly acknowledged thing.” Mcknight was working with photographers of the time, Tony McGee and Neil Kirk, fashion editor Linda McClane, and began to work with Vogue editor Beatrice Miller’s then secretary Lucinda Chambers who had been sent by her boss to get a ‘Vogue Makeover’. “I was about 18,” Lucinda Chambers explains, “when Sam came to do my hair for a shoot.” They have been working together ever since. “For someone who has been at the top of his game for 30 odd years he’s remarkably 'unfashiony'. Sam is funny, wise, loving and very,very good at what he does. He cuts through all the nonsense yet takes his job very seriously and I love that about him,” she says of their enduring friendship and creative partnership.

McKnight met Lucinda in London in the late ‘70s, a time he also met make-up artist Linda Cantello. “We forged a team and went off to try and get an agency in New York, as there’d just been Studio 54 and all of that, so we kinda went there on holiday and never came back…” In 1982 they started straight in at the top, working with American Vogue and “all these amazing photographers like Penn, Dennis Heel, Bruce, Patrick and Horst…”

New Era Vogue. Hair by Sam McKnight

Fashion was changing, a new era was dawning and McKnight was at the centre of it. “When Anna Wintour took over at American Vogue, and stylist Carlyne Cerf De Dudzeele came in, suddenly the magazine had Christian Lacroix jeans on the cover….

Yeah, I did that,” he adds almost as an aside.