Advertising Sectioned: By Barber, She's Beautiful!

Well, there’s no way anyone could deny Stanley Barber an award that might be going for the most aptly named professional of his era. With a surname like that, hairdressing was practically the man’s destiny. I’m not sure what form such a trophy would take, but he’d have been obliged to clear a bit of space for it on his crowded mantelpiece; shuffling along all the other accolades his advert mentions he’d received for his skills in London, Paris and New York, while no doubt muttering about the extra dusting.

The self-portrait he’s chosen for the advert is redolent of stage magic, as though he were the hairdressing equivalent of Harry Houdini, Derren Brown and PC Sorcar combined. Suggesting he needed only to wave his magic scissors in the general direction of a woman’s hair and, instantly, would conjure a Hollywood starlet in the mirrors of his Long Row, Beeston or Sherwood salons.  

Even the copy line has a hint of ‘Abracadabra’ about it, if you say it out loud: “By Barber, She’s Beautiful!” This would no doubt be followed by a flash of lightning, a rattle of thunder and a whole new glamorous hairstyle whenever and wherever the words were uttered. Well, at least as long as the ritual of invoking them in one of Barber’s own salons was followed according to the conjuror’s precise recommendation. After all, as the copy-line continues, “Satisfaction in every hairstyle created in his salons is reflected in the face of Stanley Barber.”

That the face in question is charismatic plays to an old idea of the hairdresser as a kind of Svengali, a man who has taken on the task of transforming any ordinary passer-by who happens to venture through his salon into a Goddess. What men like Stanley Barber were selling back in 1964 was the last gasp of an aspiration to buy a little bit of aristocratic privilege that goes back to at least the nineteenth century, when the kind of personal styling, once a reserve of the gentry, began to slowly make its way down the social order.

A few years beyond this advert, of course, the likes of Stanley Barber were displaced by the new dispensation of Vidal Sassoon and his ilk, who sold youth and cutting-edge fashion over the respectability and tradition represented by this portrait of the master craftsman – “a member of Haute Coiffure Française, Paris – Premiére Classé,” no less. But in 1964, Barber remains in his element: on a daily mission to elevate someone, perhaps even you, with the very skills that were once only available to Marie Antoinette and Greta Garbo.