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| The tennis player Roger Federer gets his hair cut by a number of stylists, including one who charges a minimum of $400, and as much as $800. CreditValerio Pennicino/Getty ImagesAdd caption |
When Parisians learned last week that President Francois Hollande
paid his hairdresser more than $10,000 a month to cut his hair, a howl was
heard from Montmartre to the Marais.
Isn’t $10,000 a month for a hairdresser, to put it bluntly,
a little ridiculous? Not so, some people think. “France is the capital of
fashion, and he is the president of the country. The hairdresser is on call,
like a doctor”.
Robin Capili said he’d never spend $10,000 a month. “I’d
invest in property,” he said. “A condo maybe.”
Tim Rogers, a stylist at Sally Hershberger’s downtown New
York studio, who charges a minimum of $400, and as much as $800, for a men’s
haircut these days, regularly flies to the Hamptons by helicopter to attend to hedge
fund managers and investment bankers. He has visited a celebrity’s home at 10
p.m. He, too, has an array of clients who go to the salon, among them the
tennis champion Roger Federer and John Kennedy Schlossberg, the grandson
of the president.
“I maintain that men’s prices should be the same as
women’s,” Mr. Rogers said last week in an interview from his home in
Connecticut. Men, he said, are often more demanding than women. “The
requirement is consistency,” he said. “You have to be available anytime,
anywhere.” Even if that means being on call 24 hours a day. “There is never a
bad time for them,” he said of his clients. “And everything has a price.”
If you are looking to save money on your monthly hair
maintenance, steer clear of Switzerland. on average, Geneva and Zurich are the
most expensive places in the world to have your hair cut.
And, as may be expected, it generally costs more to get your
hair cut if you are a woman, no matter where in the world you live. Globally,
women pay about 40 percent more than men.
In Jakarta and Hong Kong, women pay on average almost the
same as men, whereas in Dublin and Cairo, the price for women is almost three
times higher than for men.
For the price of one women’s haircut in Oslo, men could
afford to get their hair cut 18 times in Nairobi.
The fashion capital of Paris is, somewhat surprisingly, only
the world’s 19th most expensive city for a man to get a cut, suggesting that
there may be some reasonably priced local options for President François
Hollande, who may be looking for ways to cut his monthly bill of more than
$10,000.
Those willing to pay the price of a small car for hair
maintenance, however, should visit Stuart Phillips, a high-end stylist in London,
who made his name attending to British reality-television stars and the wives
of Russian oligarchs. The Diamond V.I.P. package offered by his salon costs
almost $26,000 and includes limo service, live music, products and a scalp
massage by Mr. Phillips before he cuts your hair.
