DUFFY.

Known as much for his signature long auburn hair and beard as for his elegant, edgy take on hair styling, Duffy is one of the brightest stars in the session styling firmament although an unlikely advocate of the more sophisticated side of hairdressing yet is completely at ease in that world, creating hairstyles that all women find fashionable and desirable. A working day for Duffy can mean accompanying Cameron Diaz on a film promo tour (“We recently spent three weeks together, flying around the world”, he laughs, amazed at his unbelievable good fortune) and working with international stars including Scarlett Johansson, Demi Moore and Tilda Swinton. He regularly uses his creative skills backstage at the shows for a raft of international designers including Matthew Williamson, Isaac Mizrahi, Peter Jensen,Thakoon, Marios Schwab, and Louise Goldin, and creates desirable hair for editorials with leading fashion photographers such as Terry Richardson, Ryan McGinley, Steven Klein, Arthur Elgort, Norman Jean Roy and Richard Burbridge. Having left school at 15 and following a three-year apprenticeship at Vidal Sassoon, Duffy was thrown into the deep end when he met Eugene Souleiman who took him backstage and showed him a world outside of the salon. After time out of the industry travelling, snowboarding and following a stint in his parents’ antique business, he reconnected with the influential people he’d met early in his career including the photographer Venetia Scott. This led to work with Patrick Demarchelier, Peter Lindbergh and more recently, a trip to Nashville for US Vogue with Annie Liebovitz shooting Taylor Swift involving a series of broken down planes and some ‘only in fashion’ moments that resulted in the team having just 20 minutes to shoot. He was recently chosen by T the New York Times magazine’s Sally Singer to work on a 20 day project for her inaugral issue as editor-in-chief yet says there’s still ‘so much to learn’. Youth culture and sub-cultures have always been a huge focus for his work, his earliest and most significant influence being skinheads. His father was a boxer and a skinhead who grew his hair long when he met Duffy’s hippy mother. Coming full circle Duffy met and worked with the photographer famous for recording skinhead style, Nick Knight, who remains for Duffy an important authority on contemporary fashion imagery. ‘Youth culture exists purely from the belief that you are the first to discover it and the passion it takes for you to live by it ”. That passion is evident in his work, which runs the gamut from rebellious (he once coloured Raquel Zimmerman’s hair pink for US Vogue), to downright fearless (for a McQueen campaign with Nick Knight, he worked with a collection of snakes including pythons and boa constrictors to create the hair look). However, the end result is always beautiful. With his muse as diverse as Fifties rasta style and Helmut Newton’s independent and masculine woman it’s clear that Duffy’s take on beauty is highly individualised. “What really inspires me is the creative freedom of the art world,” he says. “Fashion is exclusive but art is inclusive – that democracy is important to me,” he adds. He cites favourite artists including the American painter, sculptor and installation artist Paul Thek as well as the Russian artist resident in LA Sanya Kantarovsky. He’s a keen collector of contemporary art, much of which decorates the walls of the north London house he shares with his girlfriend the gallerist Lucy Chadwick. Apart from London which, he says “is always home” his wanderlust (his father is of Irish gypsy decent) means that a house in Slovakia as well as a barn in the Catskills get their fare share of Duffy ‘in residence’. Duffy’s US connection is cemented in his partnership in the New York outpost of the hair salon Tommy Guns which he originally helped set up in London. He is also the Creative Colour Director for Clairol, a role which means he gets to explore the further artistic dimension that colour can add to hairstyle.