Celebrity stylist Sam McKnight: ‘Boris Johnson’s hair is a disguise, a distraction’

If anyone understands the power of hair, it’s Sam McKnight. He was personal hairdresser to Diana, Princess of Wales, for much of the 1990s, behind the blonde-bombshell cover of Madonna’s 1994 Bedtime Stories album, and styled Lady Gaga with a meat headpiece and extensions for the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. “When you think of Madonna or Diana or any sort of icon, the hair is a focal point,” he ruminates.

Sitting on a mid-century-style grey sofa in his north-west London studio, wearing a suitably summery Hawaiian shirt with a pineapple print, McKnight tells me that he’s also observed Boris Johnson’s hair closely since the latter became prime minister. “He made his hair work for him,” he says. Until recently, that is. “I could see from the beginning what was going on. It’s a disguise, a distraction. The more he wanted to distract, the wilder the hair was. His hair isn’t going like that naturally, it’s placed. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was using products on it. Margaret Thatcher’s hair was also like a weapon, wasn’t it?”

While most of us aren’t weaponising our hair, our crowning glory or lack thereof is still a fairly universal preoccupation. McKnight thinks that experimenting with different looks is becoming more common at all ages, a way to avoid a style rut. “Sticking with one hairstyle is a thing of the past,” McKnight says. “It’s such a fashion barometer. People suddenly think, ‘My hair feels a bit old-fashioned. I’ve had it like this for too long.’ And the internet has sped that up tenfold. There’s a demand for change.”

Dramatic new hairstyles are a way for celebrities to seem fresh in an era of social media noise and short attention spans. But even if you don’t want to be bleaching, chopping or rotating between crazy wigs like the tinsel and candyfloss-pink couture ones perched on mannequins in McKnight’s studio, the impulse to refresh our tresses has trickled down. But, according to McKnight, it can take the form of what he has dubbed a “tweakformation” rather than a transformation.

Of Cate Blanchett, who he has worked with extensively, he says: “It’s always about trying to find new tweaks on a bob, and new ways of doing things. It can be as simple as changing a parting, giving it a bit more volume, putting a wave in it or making it straight.” Kate Moss, a longstanding collaborator and friend, goes from Brigitte Bardot to straight to a wave.

McKnight, 67, doesn’t have a salon; rather he styles hair for editorial shoots, catwalk shows and ad campaigns, and works with select celebrities. Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1955, he moved to London in the mid-1970s, became a session stylist and in 1988 styled model Michaela Bercu’s windswept, wavy hair for Anna Wintour’s first American Vogue cover. For Vivienne Westwood’s autumn/winter show in 1994, he sculpted the supermodels’ hair into curly cones and horns.

In 2017 he launched his first capsule range of styling products, including the Cool Girl Barely There Texture Mist, an excellent hairspray that has acquired a loyal following thanks to its ability to transform lank hair in need of a wash into something much closer to intentionally tousled Kate Moss tresses. Now he’s about to launch another selection of six haircare products to complement the existing styling range. At £34 for the Curl Cleanse Cleansing Conditioner, a co-wash cream for textured and curly hair, and £48 for a conditioning mask, the products are part of a wave of luxury products dubbed the “skinification of hair”.

The jovial McKnight seems proud of his ingredients, which include “upcycled” jackfruit (the non-edible waste) to reduce frizz while smoothing and defining curls in the Curl Cleanse Cleansing Conditioner, and a “Quinoa Pro Complex” of amino acids to strengthen in the Rich Cleanse Nourishing Shampoo. The fragrance has been created by British perfumer Lyn Harris and the colours are inspired by McKnight’s impressive garden in north-west London with its fantasia of flowers from sweet peas to dahlias and roses, and even the different tones within a single bloom. McKnight adds that the products reflect the essentials he keeps in his professional styling kit.

Nowadays, McKnight is focused on building his brand via his products and social media, and says he has no desire to travel the globe creating the kind of decadent magazine photoshoots he did in the 1990s. Budgets for those shoots have shrunk in line with magazine sales, but back then he would embark on a trip for six weeks at a time, often with a photographer and make-up artist, creating multiple fashion shoots for multiple magazines.

He recalls “an amazing trip for Vogue on the Green River. We flew to Utah, then we had two rafts on the river, one raft with the clothes and one raft with us, and we were constantly bailing out the rafts and then we would stop at places, take some pictures, pitch tents, sleep in the tents.” On another occasion he went to St Barths with photographer Patrick Demarchelier and make-up artist Val Garland, and “of course, our bags didn’t turn up so we had no hair equipment, Val had no make-up. We were in the local chemists and then I ended up using seawater on Kate’s hair and it looked great.”

McKnight professes to like casually undone hair, and used to tell Princess Diana: “‘You don’t really need me to do your hair all the time, it looks really good when you don’t do much to it.’ But she would say, ‘These people in the factory in Wales I’m going to meet don’t want to see me with messy hair, straight out of the gym. They want to see Princess Diana.’”

When McKnight first met Diana she had a big ’80s blow-dry and asked him what he would do with her hair. “I said I’d just cut it off short and start again. It was 1990, the ’80s puffballs had gone and she had started to sort of come out of this fairy princess thing that was bestowed upon her, and become almost this businesswoman, with Versace shoulders and short power hair.”

What does he think of the Duchess of Cambridge’s hair? “It’s amazing,” he enthuses. “She’s changed it a little bit. I see her moving into this much more sleek, modern version of herself.” He adds that “women like her and Diana, they’re kind of thrust into this thing of being a style icon. How she’s handling it now is really good.”

McKnight himself has gone from being behind the camera to becoming a brand. An exhibition of his work was held at Somerset House in London in 2016, and in 2019 he was given the Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator at the British Fashion Awards. In September he will be a judge on a new TV talent show on E4 about hairdressing, The Big Blow Out.

He clearly enjoys engaging with hair aficionados via his website and Instagram, where he posts footage of himself working at catwalk shows and videos on how to create looks such as elegant chignons. Rather than seeing this as a demystification of his creative process, he says: “I love owning it and communicating with people. The genie is out of the bottle now.”

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