If you have not heard the noise generated by 2,400 wildly over-excited hairdressers gathered together in one place, you're unlikely fully to appreciate the depth of the silence that descends when they all suddenly shut up. But there was a brief second or two, towards the end of the British Hairdressing Awards in the cavernous Great Room of the Grosvenor House hotel on Park Lane, when you could have heard a kirby grip drop. A moment of awed and absolute hush.
It was prompted by the appearance on stage of a model in a plain black dress, an iPod and an extraordinary hairdo that looked - even to a philistine who, to the best of his recollection, has not spent more than £8.50 on a haircut in his life - like a crop of magical, organically grown gold moss, and it was followed by deafening applause. "He's an artist," yelled my awestruck neighbour, Ann Adams of Adams Hair and Beauty in Halstead, Essex. "A master. If he doesn't win, there'll be a revolution."
The nation, thankfully, was spared the Hairdressers' Revolt. Extravagantly coiffed, intimately tattoed, powerfully scented, squeezed perilously into tight frocks and shiny waistcoats, they sat patiently while the evening's celeb compere, Graham Norton, did his worst - "I shaved my armpits for this, you know. Ooh, but look, there's a gent over there who looks almost heterosexual!" - until, at the end of a long evening and the beginning of what you could somehow tell was going to be a very long night, Angelo Seminara was crowned Hairdresser of the Year 2007. Cue complete hysteria.
A few weeks later, I'm sitting in front of a mirror in a swish Covent Garden salon and the self-same Mr Seminara, international creative director of Trevor Sorbie Professional, is considering how best to cut my hair. I seem to have developed a strange fascination for hairdressing that began this summer, when I read that, according to a thinktank called the Work Foundation, the three iconic jobs in 21st-century Britain were hairdressers, celebrities and management consultants. In that order.
This surprised me. We do not, in general, tend to think particularly highly of hairdressers. However well we may get on individually (and I know many people do) with our own, we do tend to mock them rather as a profession. We crack cruel jokes about feather cuts and limp wrists and permanent waves.
We certainly do not treat them with the respect they deserve. Top fashion designers we now believe to be the repositories of some kind of rarefied greater truth; top hairdressers we do not. Everyone knows the work of John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Yohji Yamamoto; no one has heard of the bloke who does the models' hair. Nor, on the whole, do our ambitions for our children extend to them pursuing a rewarding career in haircare: as a prefect at a Liverpool girls' grammar school in the 1970s, Ann Adams recalls her parents being summoned to see an apoplectic headteacher after she declared her intention of making her Saturday job her profession.
But we are wrong, for this is, in fact, a quite remarkable business, and a great British success story. It has grown by 80% in the UK over the past 10 years, and currently turns over an astonishing £5bn annually. British women have their hair done more often, and spend on average 20% more doing so, than women anywhere else in the world. The big three multinationals, Wella, L'Oréal and Schwarzkopf, all agree that London is today their leading market, comfortably ahead of France and the US. And by common consent, from LA to the Champs-Elysées, Britain's top hairdressers are the best there are.
You may, it's true, wish to quibble about the morality of spending £700 on a set of hair extensions. But on the whole, we should be celebrating British hairdressing, not knocking it. That, at any rate, is why my head is now dipped in a very elegant sink prior to being pruned by the British Hairdresser of the Year 2007, who turns out not only to be modest, unassuming and exceedingly charming, but also - as the name might have suggested - Italian. "Ah," he says. "But I've been here a long time now. I'm proud to be an Italian, of course. But I'm a British hairdresser."
Seminara, 35, first came to Britain 12 years ago after a stint at the snappiest salon in Rome, "the kind of place where the boss rides a horse to work even though he owns a Ferrari". A turbulent 11-year-old who had more or less given up on school, he'd been packed off to the local barber's during the summer holidays by his gran. "She reckoned they'd keep me out of trouble," he says. "Of course I loved the whole social thing, the older men's talk of cars and women and football. Soon I was cutting men's hair. Then I started on women's. And that was it."
Specifically, he came to London to work with Trevor Sorbie, the Scottish barber's son whose Wedge, Chop and Scrunch defined British hairdressing in the 70s and 80s, and whose appearances on the early TV makeover shows (and subsequent MBE) made him Britain's best-known stylist. It wasn't the most auspicious of starts; early in the three-month indenture everyone at Sorbie's salon serves before being hired, Seminara made the mistake of cutting the boss's daughter's hair: "Jade Sorbie had long hair, and she warned me she'd cry when I cut it. Well, she did. Like, really cried. Trevor had to buy her a wig. And I hadn't passed my final exam." (Plainly not one to bear a grudge, Sorbie, who now devotes much of his time to personalising wigs for chemotherapy patients, this year declared Seminara his professional heir.)
But why Britain in the first place? What is it about London that, at some stage in their careers, draws many of the world's most talented and ambitious crimpers here? How have we become the centre of global hairdressing? Seminara, looking askance at my two-month-old £8 haircut and observing generously that it is sometimes possible, if one is very lucky, to get a decent haircut for that price (he charges more like £125), has a technical explanation involving the physical characteristics of Anglo-Saxon hair, which, he reckons, is far finer than any other, and thus demands spectacularly expert cutting if it is to resemble anything at all.
At the hairdressing awards, Brent Barber, Britain's aptly named (and Australian-born) Male Hairdresser of the Year 2005, told me it was mainly down to the vast quantities of dosh washing around London, and to the city's sheer vibrancy. Peter Belcher, managing director of Schwarzkopf Professional, which sponsors the evening, says it is because British women experiment more than their continental or US counterparts. "Here," he says, "a hairstyle is part of a total look; it's inspired by music, fashion, a whole scene. And British women like to change their appearance often; they're a lot more daring." Plenty, it seems, will happily fork out £200 on a radical new cut and colour; women abroad tend to be far more conservative, choosing a style that suits them and sticking to it.
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