Hairstylist Vidal Sassoon Dead at 84

Image by Getty Images
Vidal Sassoon, the well-known British hairdresser credited with creating the 1960s “bob,” has died at the age of 84, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Sassoon was born to Sephardic parents in London in 1928. After his father left the family when Sassoon was three years old, his mother, facing extreme poverty, made the difficult decision to place Sassoon and his younger brother in a Jewish orphanage.
Read our coverage of “Vidal Sassoon: The Movie,” a documentary film about the stylist.
At the start of World War II, Sassoon was evacuated to the countryside. When he returned to London, he began apprenticing with hairdressers, and also at age 17 became the youngest member “43 shtarkers,” a group of Jewish war veterans devoted to fighting Fascism in post-war London. After a tour fighting with Palmach in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Sassoon returned to London, went to work for a prominent hairstylist and began to develop his own style.
Sassoon became known at the height of his career for geometric, “wash and wear” hairstyles that framed the face and were easy to maintain.
In 1982 he founded The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an academic, non-political institution dedicated to gathering information for the study of anti-Semitism.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Sassoon died following an unspecified illness, surrounded by his family at his Mulholland Drive home.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 2
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 3
Opinion Is this new documentary giving voice to American Jewish anguish — or simply stoking fear?
- 4
Opinion Mike Huckabee said there’s ‘no such thing as a Palestinian.’ It’s worth thinking about what that means
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Think every Palestinian in Gaza is Hamas? This week’s protests prove you’re wrong
-
Opinion A Palestinian Oscar-winner’s arrest shocked the world. For these Jewish activists, it was terrifyingly normal
-
Opinion In the Trump administration and Israel, a grotesque display of virility coupled with a loss of humanity
-
Fast Forward Cornell’s new Jewish president says he is ‘very comfortable with where Cornell is currently’
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.