My new vintage hair!

Yesterday I took the plunge and visited the much-talked-about Nina’s Vintage Hair Parlour. Nina’s salon, tucked away upstairs at Alfie’s Antiques Market, is one of only a handful of hair salons in the UK specializing in vintage and retro cuts and styles.

I’d never visited Alfie’s Antiques Market before. I had fun browsing, but wasn’t particularly tempted to buy. The word “antiques” in London is generally a red flag for horrendous overpricing, and Alfie’s is no exception. There’s a lot of gorgeous stuff there, but I can’t see the vintage clothing/jewelry/accessory shopping being very enjoyable for anyone who earns their own money and has heard of the internet  — I saw a lot of American vintage pieces being sold for two to four times the amount I could buy them for online.

I’m not sure how I feel about UK vintage sellers importing so much stuff from the US while selling Britain’s history overseas. One vendor I spoke to said that the American appetite for CC41 goods had been keeping him in premium cat food for months. Surely the current overrepresentation of American wartime vintage in the UK creates a misleading picture of what people were wearing and how they were living over here? I’m pretty sure that by and large, it wasn’t as glam as many people think. But I digress.

I was in need of a makeover. My hair was getting long and boring.

Previous attempts to style it using vintage methods had gone comically awry.

So I made an appointment at Nina’s. The salon consists of a single small room crammed with vintage posters, vintage ads for hair products, Hollywood dressing room-style mirrors, implements of beauty, several stylists and a very small dog named Ramon. Service is decidedly Slavic: staff are brisk, competent and civil, but don’t expect them to rush forward to greet you with a broad smile and a cup of tea… especially if you’re the last customer on a Saturday and were booked in after closing time by mistake.

Nina really knows her stuff. I explained I wanted a basic 1940s do — rolls in the front and curls in the back — and a cut that would work with either vintage or minimal styling. She obliged with a horseshoe-shaped cut — shorter in front, longer in back — that incorporated some long layers. Then she went to town with the product.

Nina divided my hair into front and back sections with a part from ear to ear. Then she set the back on about 8-10 large BaByliss hot sticks, spraying each strand with a generous amount of hairspray before winding it around the stick. Apparently the key is to spritz the ends in particular with enough hairspray that they grab the roller and can be tucked in smoothly.

She then backcombed holy hell out of the front of my hair, spraying each section afterwards for a ton of volume, and rolled it deftly into two victory rolls. Nina’s trick for smooth victory rolls seems to be to start by wrapping the ends of the hair once or twice around her fingers in the opposite direction to the way the roll will ultimately go, and then to give that curl a half-twist before rolling it down into position. I’m explaining this badly, but if you try it yourself, you may find that the roll is easier to handle. Nina then used a mixture of regular and extra-long bobby pins to secure the rolls, and gave them another crop-dusting with the hairspray.

I asked for victory rolls; she gave me victory rolls. But for someone not used to big hair, this style was a lot to live up to.

Here I am looking ambivalent about the prospect of spending the rest of the evening sporting this much height.

But when I got home later that night and brushed out the style, I found to my delight that it fell very nicely into noirish waves.

The wash, cut and set took just over an hour and cost me £65. This is a very bouncy and versatile style that I will enjoy playing with in the weeks to come.