FLARE sat down with famed hairdresser Orlando Pita, a former Wall Street exec who's now known for his $800 haircuts. Find out why he's worth the big bucks.
As someone highly tapped into the fashion industry, you're a regular backstage at fashion shows, shooting magazine covers and working with celebrities. Can you describe the 'in' look right now in hair?
Now that I have a salon I realize that what we do in the fashion business is so different to what (real) women's needs are. Quite a few of our clients come in with really long hair and are ready to cut it off. But in fashion, we only work with 16-year old models who don't want to cut their hair. So we have to try and think of ways to do hairstyles in shoots with long hair as a base. I think we end up doing, for a lot of these shows and shoots, hairdos and styles that women don't really want to take the time to do themselves. A good hair cut works in the morning with minimal styling time and good products help her to get out of the house and start her day. I'm trying to bring the two worlds together. I've tried to introduce haircutting into the fashion business for a while now, but it's hard. The girls don't want to cut their hair. The few that do, like Agyness Deyn, who's chopped her hair off, and bleached it, do so well. I mean she's a quirky girl, she's not your obvious beauty and yet she had 16 pages in Vogue a couple of months ago. I don't know why these girls are so scared. Really they end up all looking the same-you can't differentiate one from the other.
What are the signs of a great haircut?
If you can make it look good when you do it yourself later and people still say to you, "God your hair looks great," you've got a great haircut. For me it's not about how it looks when you leave the salon. That should be a given. I don't care if you pay $50 or $800, people should take pride in their work and your hair should look good at every level.
What is the cost to sit in your chair?
$800.00. I do your hair from the beginning to the end. It's usually about an hour to an hour and a half. A lot of hairdressers charge $500 and do four haircuts in an hour. The assistant's blow-drying it and nobody writes bad stuff about them. I've gotten a lot of negative press about my price.
Why is that?
Nobody had charged $800 before I did so that was the outrage. I opened my salon in October 2004 and that month the New York Times wrote a terrible article on the cover of the style section.
How often are you in the salon?
One week of each month.
When you're not behind the chair, what's a typical day like for you?
I'm on an airplane a lot. I mean, there are a lot of different facets to my job. There are the 360 styling products I developed with T3, I consult, I have the salon, I do fashion shows, photo shoots, videos, TV commercials. And I run my business as a whole, so I have an office, with employees. I don't know if there is a typical day in my life. I travel a lot. And a lot means a lot.
What was the moment when you felt you really made it?
There was a shoot I did with Mario Testino and Carine Roitfeld [now editor of Paris Vogue] was the stylist. It was for Glamour magazine in Paris. We were doing a shoot on a rebellious girl from a bourgeoisie family and I did this kind of punk hair and tied these ropes around the girl's head and braids around her face and stuff. Carine came the next day and said, "I hate the hair. I hate the makeup. I hate the styling. Let's start again." It's hard to hear that. Everybody was like, I can't believe it. She pushed us in another direction that resulted in Jean Paul Gaultier seeing the pictures and flying me to London to have lunch with him. I got his show from that shoot so it kind of changed a lot of things for me. Because then I got Chanel a few seasons after that and then Gucci a few seasons after that. That shoot changed me.
