Simon Forbes: Innovative punk hairstylist who pioneered unique looks

He was celebrated for his use of extensions and vibrant dyes which stood out against the slicked-back Elvis and moptop Beatles coiffures of Britain’s Swinging Sixties

Forbes's (right) many famous clients included Madonna, Cher, Diana Ross, Annie Lennox and Kate Moss (Rex)

As London’s premier hairstylist amid the punk revolution, Simon Forbes did not just cut hair. He often lengthened it.

Using his own invention, what he called “monofibre” extensions, he added acrylic hair to clients who wanted bobtails, ragtails, spikes or dreadlocks – motifs that expressed punk identity as much as the safety pins clipped into his clients’ noses, earlobes and black clothes.

Forbes was also celebrated for his colouring – bright pink, orange or purple – itself revolutionary after the slicked-back Elvis or moptop Beatles coiffures of Britain’s Swinging Sixties.

The marquee names who dropped into his shop included Madonna, Cher, Carly Simon, Diana Ross, Princess Stephanie of Monaco (daughter of the former Hollywood star Grace Kelly), Boy George and Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, comedian Tracey Ullman, and models Kate Moss and Elle Macpherson.

Yet Forbes abhorred the label of “celebrity stylist”. He kept his prices low, and his black-facade salon Antenna, in London’s Kensington, was frequented by working-class (sometimes unemployed) punks and others from all walks of life.

He died on 9 May at a hospital in London from bowel cancer, said his brother, Nick Plaut.

With a distaste for simple hirsute categorisation, Forbes stood out with a Liberace-style pompadour above a ponytail and punky shaved hairline. For his clients’ hair extensions, he used a self-designed heat tool he called a C2 to seal the monofibre to the real hair without using glue or damaging the scalp. He refused to use “secondhand” human hair for his extensions, saying women and children in the developing world were being exploited to get their hair.

“Overnight, he changed the face of hair,” Washington Post fashion editor Nina Hyde wrote in 1983, noting that he preferred razors and clippers to scissors.

“A scissor cut will always be heavy, a razor cut will always be light,” Forbes told Hyde. “When you cut with scissors, every line is a hard line that has weight, and falls down with gravity. With a razor the ends of the hair are frayed and light. Also, a razor can get right into the roots. Soft, silky hair is useless to us. You can’t do anything with it. It just flies around all over the place.”

His Antenna salon, in what was once an 18th-century stable yard, attracted many of the punk or new-wave groups of the 1980s including the Eurythmics, the Stray Cats, Duran Duran and the Thompson Twins.

His reputation expanded globally in 1983 after Boy George, complete with multicoloured locks and braids by Forbes, appeared on Top of the Pops singing “Karma Chameleon” with his band Culture Club.

Andrew Simon Forbes Plaut was born in London on 16 September 1949, and grew up in the suburb of New Malden. He was adopted as a baby, and he never knew, or sought to find, his biological parents.

His adoptive parents were Hermann Plaut, a German Jewish engineer who had come to Britain in 1936 to flee the rise of the Nazis, and his wife, Peggy Clark, who was of Scottish Highland ancestry. (Forbes dropped the surname Plaut when he went into the hairstyling business.)

He attended a boarding school in Somerset, but he learnt only years later that dyslexia had probably hindered his educational progress.

Leaving school as soon as he could – at age 16 – he worked briefly for an advertising agency but later recalled to The Post: “I was into drugs, like everyone else my age. I had the new consciousness, and advertising wasn’t a part of that, I had to get out.”

“We were hippies, it was flower power. This is love and peace, man,” he said. “Everyone went through a straightening out after going over the top, doing their brains in one way or the other.”

Pressed by his parents, he took a three-year apprenticeship in hairdressing. By his mid-20s, he was helping run a 25-strong chain of British hair salons called Alan International, very much along the lines of the better-known Vidal Sassoon salons of the time with neat and tidy decors to match the hairstyles.

But anarchic punk music was on the rise, and Forbes flitted between the nightclubs, focusing as much on the hairstyles as the music. “It was all being done at home, not by professional people,” he told The Post. “I was seeing such great exciting stuff and it was homemade. We were spending our whole lives and existence and consciousness devoted to one industry, and we were not actually producing what people required and what people wanted. It was making me sick.”

So in 1980, he put his savings into his own salon, Antenna. Its black-painted exterior – the colour favoured by the punks of the time – sending out an immediate message. Its edgy interior, with a narrow spiral staircase, wild west-style barber’s chairs and brass, copper and bronze sculptures made by Forbes himself, was punk personified.

After the Boy George appearance on Top of the Pops, Forbes began getting invitations from around the world, particularly the United States, to address avant-garde hairstylists. On one tour in 1986, Forbes was in Atlanta, when he fell in love with Jana Staub, a freelance journalist from Schenectady, New York, and they married in London later that year.

She died of breast cancer in 2002. In addition to his brother, survivors include two daughters.

He mounted hairstyling shows, and one at the Javits convention centre in Manhattan was said to have greatly influenced American hairdressers. He set up his own company Dome Cosmetics to market his monofibre extensions and accessories.

Despite his world-class reputation, he got angry when journalists, celebrities or others described his hairstyling as art. “That is a precious view,” he once said. “I really don’t care about that. Joe Bloke is the person I’m interested in. I’m just a hairdresser, nothing else.”

Andrew Simon Forbes Plaut, hairstylist, born 16 September 1949, died 9 May 2020

© The Washington Post