Brad Johns, the superstar colorist identified for his “chunking” method and influential work with the likes of Christy Turlington, Kate Moss, and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, died final week at his house in Los Angeles. He was 70.
Here, revisit Vogue’s July 1995 profile of Johns, titled “The Color Czar,” by Vanessa Friedman.
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High above Fifth Avenue, atop the self-enclosed universe that’s the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon, is a world of rococo mirrors and gilt-edged armchairs, of candelabra held aloft by intricately carved moors (lighting peach- and rose-tinted partitions), and rooms opening into rooms, each house crammed with the muted hum of discreet conversations, the splash of water into porcelain basins, and the slicing of scissors via hair. This is Versailles-through-the-looking-glass, a.okay.a. the Oribe Salon: a palace of magnificence that’s actually devoted to magnificence. And, simply as the authentic had its Sun King, this citadel has its sun-kissed king: Brad Johns, commander in colour, tyrant of tints, dictator of dyes. For him, hair will not be merely hair; it’s a calling.
“My mission on this planet is to make people’s hair look good,” Johns says, working a hand via his personal yellow-brown, blow-dried, shoulder-length locks. “Everyone’s hair, no matter what the exact tint, should be bright, beautiful, and expensive-looking.”
As it occurs, this can be a good time to be somebody who desires to make everybody’s tresses shiny and exquisite. Faux hair colour, from platinum to black, has by no means been so massive: Model Shalom stole the spring reveals when she went from her pure plain brown to ebony; three of People’s Most Beautiful People are shiny fire-engine redheads; and even O.J. prosecutor Marcia Clark has used colour to offer her case an added increase. When glamour changed pure as the look of selection, hair—and its energy to name consideration, enhance, and outline—gained new efficiency. And that gave high colorists al-most incalculable authority.
Thus Johns’s colour room is his kingdom, and there are particular hard-and-fast guidelines for admittance. No one, for instance, who desires hair like a politician’s spouse—suppose Nancy Reagan blonde—is allowed in. “That color is my nightmare!” shudders Johns. “It is so tired!” Ditto anybody who asks for beige (“Beige is the color of fur, not hair!”), anybody who makes use of the phrase frosting (“Ugh—it’s highlights!”), anybody who requests a wine-ish tint (“Not unless you’re in a rock band!”), or anybody with a hankering for a full head of highlights: “Cappellini hair! A head of little worms!”
To acquire an viewers with Johns, it’s important to give your self over to him and his imaginative and prescient. “You just have to go with what I tell you,” he shrugs, and legions do: trend editors, actresses, ladies who fly in from locations like Bermuda and Tokyo, ladies who save their pennies and take the practice up from Annapolis, ladies who simply cease in on their lunch hour, and innumerable fashions. (Many companies routinely ship new ladies to Johns for a fast makeover. “You can’t be a model and not color your hair,” he says. “Real hair just dies under the lights.”) He has taken mannequin Yasmeen Ghauri from her pure mahogany to shiny blonde for a Clairol advert and again once more, made Claudia Schiffer simply this facet of platinum, and remodeled Meghan Douglas from girl-next-door blonde into latter-day Rita Hayworth crimson. He has additionally completed Jon Bon Jovi, Brooke Shields, Tatum O’Neal, and Ivana. He does 30 to 40 heads a day, 4 days per week, for ten months a yr—a median of 6,160 heads yearly. When he’s actually “on,” he can do 5 heads without delay, every inside an hour.