I first met Sam McKnight on a shoot in the early 1980s. He was holding a can of what looked like Reddi-wip and giving it a good shake. The can wasn’t filled with dairy topping from Indianapolis; it was mousse from France, an incredible marvel of polymers and propulsion. The models, in evening dresses, jewelry, and emphatic makeup, wore billows of the mousse in their hair, which was almost standing on end.
It was the perfect invention for Sam, a stylist with a hunger for the new, a joyful sense of humor, and an improvisational approach to hair.
Those were early days for him, but you’d never know it by his tear sheets. Every photographer of note wanted him—Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Patrick Demarchelier, Peter Lindbergh, and Nick Knight, to name a few. He collaborated for more than 20 years with Vivienne Westwood and for 12 years with Karl Lagerfeld. He razored and brushed every model, from the supers in the 90s to the Hadids now.
But it was his time with Diana, the Princess of Wales, that brought him global attention outside the fashion world. They first met in secret—or at least it was a secret to him. Demarchelier asked Sam and the makeup artist Mary Greenwell to prepare for someone “important.” Sam expected Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, whose teased and lacquered hair looked as if it were carved out of oak.
In walked Diana, Thatcher’s stylistic foil. “She had the … big, high, ladies-who-lunch hair,” Sam tells me over tea at his house in North West London. He pinned her hair to make it look short, then slipped in a tiara as if it were no more formal than a drugstore hairband. After the shoot, “she asked me to cut her hair,” Sam tells me. “It was 1990, so it was going from 80s excess into more streamlined power suits.” He helped move her in that direction, too.
Once aligned with Sam, Diana kept the boyish crop. “She used to have a perm when I wasn’t looking,” he says. “So I’d come by and say, ‘Let’s cut this out. It was two years of that before she finally ditched it.”
Sam styled the Princess’s hair most mornings when he was in London, and sometimes he’d return to get her ready for the evening’s events. When Princes William and Harry wandered in, he would cut their hair, too. The relationship was intimate and private. “She was just a joy. She was fantastic.” And then it ended as abruptly as it started. “I had a tough time when Diana died,” Sam says. “It was so sudden. And then it was just done.” Sam never spoke about her until well after her death.
Anna Harvey, who, when she was an editor at British Vogue, advised Diana on matters of style, later wrote about Sam’s effect. “He helped her see herself in a different way. She grew up, grew older, grew wiser and he was there guiding her in the background. I don’t think anyone should ever underestimate his influence on her style.” This was something for a man from a coal-mining village in Scotland, and he speaks about this time as a supreme adventure.
When I urge him to select his greatest hits, his work with Diana comes first. Kate Moss with her shaggy layers is a close second. In many of the photographs, it doesn’t look as if he did much more than tousle Moss’s hair, and that’s by design. He is a master tousler. He likes hair that moves and changes, never looking stiff or untouchable. He tells of a shoot a few years ago with Kate Moss for Skims, commending Moss’s “undone hair”—the ultimate goal for a stylist who doesn’t call attention to himself or his exceptional skill.
Sam styled the Princess’s hair most mornings when he was in London, and sometimes he’d return to get her ready for the evening’s events. When Princes William and Harry wandered in, he would cut their hair, too.
He also likes crazy, tearing strips of precious Chanel tweed and massing it around ponytails for a show, gluing colored chicken feathers along the part of the hair for a recent shoot, piling balls of hair on a head like scoops of ice cream for Vivienne Westwood. It was Sam who pinned the steak on Lady Gaga’s wig in 2010 for her appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards. The steak was in the hotel’s mini-fridge, the matching meat dress was hanging in the bathroom, “and the flies were unbelievable,” he tells me. It was part of a year they spent together, often involving 10 outfit changes a day. And, he says, “it was an absolute pleasure.”
A few days before we met, he had a reunion with Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, and Cindy Crawford while they were in London. “I love these women as they get older,” he tells me. “I love seeing them going from the teenagers who know nothing that we kind of stack this look on and seeing them develop their own thing.”
McKnight has a line of hair-care products inspired by all his years using other brands, including that first-gen mousse. He loves the way there are no rules or pervading trends in hair today, preferring individual expression in all its variety. “I’m kind of over the long curtains of hair. I’m into a bit of a funny bang or a bit of a flick or a bit of a funny color somewhere.” Always funny and slightly off. Anything but stiff. Anything but precise. And do not mention a wiggy bob in his presence. Hearing him talk about it, you can see him twitching to mess it up. He can barely contain himself.
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look
