The tall, elegant sylph walks in and addresses me with her cut-glass English accent. She is educated at private school, well-versed in politics and history and a graduate of the University of Leeds - I guess the last thing I expect her to be is a hairdresser. And me saying that is probably the last thing she wants to hear as well.
When Niki Moores told her parents after her A-levels that she wanted to do an arts degree, they were far from delighted. When she graduated and discovered her vocation was hairdressing, they were even less pleased. "They did want me to be a lawyer really," she says, laughing. After finishing her hard-petitioned-for BA in fashion management at Leeds, she went to work a ski season at Meribel and "looked into her soul" to find the perm lotion and the rollers calling.
The perception is that hairdressing is a no-brainer career, something you do if you fail everything. It's certainly not the sort of life a private school-educated young girl would be encouraged to take up. "At first I did really worry what everyone would say," Moores admits. "At the back of my mind was the thought of school reunions and what my old teachers would think."
Twenty-five-year-old South African graphic design graduate Rick Ziehl agrees. Though his mother ran a salon, his father wasn't pleased with the thought of his son going into it, so he did a graphic design degree instead and on a year out in London decided to stay and train. "When I started looking at the training and the effort required, I realised it was a really challenging and stimulating job," he says.
Both Moores and Ziehl work in Michael Van Clarke's salon in Marylebone, an upmarket establishment with wooden panelling and vast, shiny, clean spaces. Customers are of the moneyed variety and the atmosphere is as far removed from the sex and scandal of Cutting It or the back-street grime of most media portrayals of the industry. Moores and Ziehl are part of a new breed of hairstylist - one which is hell-bent on reclaiming the job as a highly paid, skilled and respected one.
In fact, far from just requiring a couple of E-grade GCSEs, says Van Clarke, known in the hairdressing world for his signature Diamond Dry Cut method, "Hairdressing requires the feel for balance and spatial awareness of an architect, the performance skills of an actor, the understanding of a psychologist, the creative skills of a master artist, the deft hand of a leading surgeon, a whole host of business skills, the empathy of a close friend and the eye of a design guru."
To this end Van Clarke has developed his own training academy, which includes a 12-month training programme. New recruits also make the transformation over three years from apprenticeship to partnership though a limited liability partnership scheme which allows employees to become partners after the two-year graduate stylist period.
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