Tom Connell’s hairdressing career began from a pair of football boots! Here, he shares his creative processes, advice to young hairdressers, and what he’s got lined up…
“I remember I really wanted these football boots and I asked my dad for the money and he said ‘If you work at the salon for three days, you’ll have enough money to buy them’, so I did.” Tom Connell tells us as we chat on the phone about his career. Turns out, the football career didn’t go anywhere, but after three days in his mum and dad’s salon, his hairdressing career did. “Saturdays got me hooked,” he says. “I liked being around the older people that dressed differently to anyone that was in my small town in the north of England – everyone just seemed cool.” And so from the age of 13 he never left the salon.
It was only when he finished school that he moved to Andrew Collinge in Manchester. “I worked for Andrew for a few years and I loved it. Living in the city centre of Manchester felt like I’d moved to New York at the time, coming from my small town,” he says. But it was seeing Trevor Sorbie on stage that made Tom want more. “I was blown away by him doing what I thought were impossible things. I just said to my dad, I want to do what he’s doing, I don’t just want to work in a town, I want to work for him.”
From there, Tom managed to get a job with Trevor and really started learning his craft. “He always used to say: ‘It’s like driving a car – you don’t learn when you pass your test, you start learning afterwards’.” But something else that was always in the back of Tom’s mind was photography. “I wanted to do hair shows in a different way than what I felt they were being done, so I asked my wife if I could take all of our savings and use them to put on my own hair show,” he tell us. “Luckily, she said yes. We hired a little theatre in Chelsea, I shot a collection, shot some videos with my friends, and I had no idea because we’d never done a show before, but I got Trevor’s attention and he asked me to be his Assistant Art Director.” A year later, Tom became Global Art Director, helping build an art team, all while being mentored by Trevor.
Next came Davines. “Six years ago Davines contacted me asking me to be their new Art Director,” he tells us. “It was a big change going from Art Director of a salon company to a brand but I’ve been living in Italy with my family now for four years!” A typical day in the life? “The first thing I do in my studio here that I have at the Davines village in Parma, is I’ll sit with a coffee and look at my wall,” says Tom. “I have a magnetic wall in my studio where I pin all my ideas and projects, and look at where the ideas are going. Then I might have a day where we’re on set shooting, and then it could be something like this week where I’m going to Mexico to present our latest campaign.”
Naturally, we couldn’t help but ask where Tom gets his inspiration from. “I think the hardest thing for anyone to do is come up with a style of work that’s recognisably theirs. But I think the only way you can do that, especially as a hairdresser, is to use your interests outside of hairdressing, and bring them into it,” he explains. “Everyone is an individual person, our taste in clothes and film and music and all those things – you have to try and pull from them. If anything catches my attention, I make a note of it, take a photograph or write it down and file it. Then once a month, I’ll sit and I’ll go through that file and there tends to be a red thread through the things you’ve noticed.”
His advice for hairdressers starting out now? Take an original path. “I’ve always tried to carve my own path in my career, whether that’s with the style of the hair or the style of photography I was doing which was kind of against the grain of what most people my age were doing,” he shares. “If you do the same path as everyone else, you can’t expect to stand out. Make sure you’re saying something different, don’t look at what’s popular, make your own statement rather than looking at what people have done before you and doing a version of that.”
Speaking of paths, what has Tom got lined up next? “I’m in the early processes of working on the creative concepts of all the photography campaigns for this year, then there’s some shows. We’ve just launched a campaign so there’s a lot of travelling to Mexico, Amsterdam, Ireland, America and Japan! I love it, I can’t believe it’s my job actually – it’s nice to have your hobby as your job.” Seems that swapping the football pitch for the salon was the right move all along!
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