Celebrity hairstylist and beauty tycoon John Frieda has died at the age of 75, his salon has announced. The Londoner, whose clients over five decades included Princess Diana, Madonna, Nicole Kidman and Scarlett Johansson, passed away peacefully with his family around him, according to a post on the salon’s official Instagram account. No cause of death was given.
The salon described him as “a true icon of the hair industry” and said he was the man who had taught its team everything they knew.
Tributes pour in for John Frieda
Messages of sympathy quickly followed from across the fashion and beauty world. The British Beauty Council and broadcaster Trinny Woodall both sent their love to his family online.
Jo Wood, the former wife of Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood, remembered him doing her hair when she was just 16 and he was still a junior assistant. His stepdaughter, Asia Agnelli Lagrange, said the family had lost the best man she had ever known.
Cetera Lamb, creative director at his London salon, hailed him as a maverick of hairdressing and said he had led the business for half a century.
From Fleet Street barber’s grandson to global brand
Born Alan Frieda in 1951, hairdressing ran in his blood. His father ran a salon in Ealing and his grandfather was a barber on Fleet Street. According to the Mirror, he started calling himself John early on simply because the salon he worked in already had an Alan on staff.
He cut his teeth as an assistant to Leonard Lewis at the House of Leonard in London, the stylist credited with the crop that made Twiggy a star. Frieda went on to work on shoots for British Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, styling the likes of Twiggy, Jackie Onassis and Mick Jagger.
In 1976 he designed the sleek bowl cut worn by Joanna Lumley as Purdey in The New Avengers, a look that became one of the most copied hairstyles of the decade. The same year, aged just 25, he opened his own salon.
The Frizz-Ease fortune
The name John Frieda became familiar on bathroom shelves around the world thanks to a haircare range he developed in the 1980s with American executive Gail Federici. Its best-known product, Frizz-Ease, launched in 1988 and became a household staple.
In 2002 he sold the haircare business to Japanese giant Kao in a deal worth around $450 million (about £260 million), but kept hold of his salons. He went on to run five of them, two in London, two in New York and one in Los Angeles.
Marriage to Lulu and family life
Frieda married Scottish singer Lulu in 1976 and the couple had a son, Jordan, before they separated in 1991. He met Frances Avery Agnelli in 2002 and the pair married in 2019; they have a daughter, Luna, and a son, Jackson.
John Frieda is survived by his wife, four children and two grandchildren.
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Sources: The Irish News (PA), Mirror via AOL
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