PROFILE
Cuts Hairdressers James Lebon. The Fin. Vidal Sassoon. Kensington Market. International Stussy Tribe. Words Andy Thomas Portraits Ross Trevail
More than 20 years in the making, Cuts: The Movie is a documentary by Australian filmmaker Sarah Lewis. The film profiles the creative community around the influential hairdressers Cuts, from its birth in Kensington Market in 1979 to its current home in Soho. “In the mid 1990s I’d just finished a film for Channel 4 and was thinking about what to do next,” says Lewis. “My friend Jenny and her brother, the photographer William Selden, were part of the Cuts family. She started talking to me about Cuts and so we went down there. And that was it, we started filming together in the late 1990s and I’ve been doing it ever since.” The genius behind the original Cuts was the late James Lebon, who created a template for a new breed of alternative hairdressers. The younger brother of fashion photographer Mark Lebon, he was encouraged to pursue hairdressing by his father, who was a friend of Vidal Sassoon. Soon after completing his course at the Sassoon Academy he set his sights on his own hairdressers, inspired by the DIY ethic of punk. Opening the first tiny shop in the basement of Kensington Market, he found himself amongst a creative community with stalls such as Jay Strongman’s Rock-A-Cha and Lloyd Johnson’s The Modern Outfitter. With his sharp eye for the underground styles of the day, Lebon was as radical as he was talented. Known as James Cuts, he moved his store to Kensington Church 58
Street with his partner Steve Brooks in 1982. On the ground floor above the renamed These Are Cuts they set up an art gallery, where designer Tom Dixon, a regular customer, first exhibited his reclaimed scrap metal work. Along with Antenna, on the same street, Cuts was the first in a new type of independent hairdressers. The multi-ethnic aesthetic of Cuts chimed with that of Ray Petri’s Buffalo look. And after an introduction to Petri by brother Mark Lebon (Buffalo photographer), James became their session hairdresser. Despite working on many shoots for style magazines such as i-D and The Face, he remained wary of the fashion world. “Fashion in hair – I think it’s a load of rubbish. I think everyone’s hair should be done to suit them individually as human beings. Not just to suit a mad rockabilly trend or whatever,” he told Paula Yates in an interview on TV show The Tube. By 1983 he was making more regular trips to the US, styling hair on various shoots. He brought back early mix tapes from New York and helped set up the influential hip-hop club the Language Lab. Soon after the shop had moved to its new address on Frith Street in Soho, Lebon left Cuts to join film school at New York University. He went on to become an influential video director working with the likes of Bomb the Bass and Mantronix. Through his connections made in New York he also became a founding member of the International Stussy Tribe.
From its new home in Soho, Cuts was steered through the rest of the decade and beyond by Steve Brooks and partners Pete Dowland, Andrew Daniel, and Roydon Davies. This was a hugely creative time in Soho, and Cuts would become part of a tight community of freethinkers, whose work reflected their anything goes attitude. As well as being a breeding ground for young talent and innovative haircuts, it also provided inspiration to other future salons in Soho such as Fish, opened in 1987. Through the 1990s the renamed Cuts Soho, further down on Frith Street, was to continue to forge its own path in street style. Some of the cuts to emerge from the salon included the Buddha, with its shaved front and tuft of hair around the crown, and the fin that was sent global thanks to frequent customer Fran Healy, lead singer of Travis. He was just one of many musicians who became regulars, and everyone from Goldie to James Lavelle owed their hairstyles to the salon. We Are Cuts now operates out of a basement on Dean Street, where it retains the maverick air of the original store. “I like the guys you’ve got in there now, they are really lovely people,” James Lebon says in the forthcoming documentary. “They are just the same sort of people, you know, just as much trouble.” Lebon died in December 2008, aged just 49, but his spirit lives on in one of the few remaining independent shops in Soho. >