Leonard of Mayfair: The Forgotten King of Upper Grosvenor Street

Ask anyone to name a famous hairdresser and you'll hear "Vidal Sassoon." Ask who cut Twiggy's crop, gave the Beatles their moptops, styled a US President, and trained half the famous names that came after — and most people go quiet. The answer is Leonard Lewis: Leonard of Mayfair. He worked five storeys of a Georgian townhouse at 6 Upper Grosvenor Street, next to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and for a while he was the most glamorous hairdresser on earth.

I work in Mayfair myself, and I feel strongly that we who cut hair here owe this man his story back. So here it is.

The other boy from Shepherd's Bush

Leonard was born in June 1938 in working-class west London — the son of a wheeler-dealer car salesman and a blind mother. Like Sassoon (also from Shepherd's Bush; the two became firm friends), he clawed his way into the West End with charm, nerve and genuine hands. He landed at Sassoon's salon and quickly stood out as the most gifted cutter in the building — so gifted that after about a year he left, reportedly after a disagreement over cutting technique. Vidal was pure geometry. Leonard wanted softness.

That difference matters. After a short-lived partnership — Leonard and Raphael, at 34 Duke Street in Mayfair — he opened The House of Leonard at 6 Upper Grosvenor Street: a five-storey Georgian building that had once belonged to the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli. It became London's first true "lifestyle" salon, cutting for both men and women under one roof, with long carpeted stairs and pink-and-grey client gowns designed by Zandra Rhodes. If Sassoon's was the Bauhaus, Leonard's was the theatre.

The clientele

The list is honestly absurd. Jackie Kennedy — and John F. Kennedy himself, then President. Grace Kelly. Audrey Hepburn. Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. Terence Stamp, Jerry Hall, Bianca Jagger, Marie Helvin, Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand, Faye Dunaway, Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty. He worked on Stanley Kubrick's films. At Brian Epstein's request, the fringes the Beatles had picked up in Paris were shaped at the House of Leonard into the finished moptop that conquered the world — Paul stayed a client for decades. And because this was the sixties, he also styled Reggie Kray's bride on her wedding day. Aristocracy, Hollywood and the East End underworld, all up the same carpeted stairs.

1966: eight hours that made Twiggy

The defining moment came in 1966. Justin de Villeneuve brought in a skinny teenage girl from Neasden called Lesley Hornby — nickname "Twiggy" — because he knew Leonard was looking for models to test a radical new crop on. Leonard took eight hours over the cut, with his brilliant young colourist Daniel Galvin doing the colour. A promotional photograph by Barry Lategan went up in the salon. Within days, a Daily Express fashion editor spotted it and asked who the girl was. Weeks later, Twiggy's father opened the paper to find his daughter named "The Face of '66."

Think about what that means. A haircut — one haircut, done in Mayfair — launched the most famous modelling career of the decade and helped define the entire look of the sixties. In a fashion world still full of perming, primping and tonging, Leonard's crop was a small revolution of restraint.

The academy nobody calls an academy

Here is the part I love most as a working hairdresser: look at who came out of that building. John Frieda — apprenticed under Leonard before building a global product empire. Daniel Galvin — the godfather of modern hair colour. Nicky Clarke. Keith Wainwright of Smile. Michael Gordon, who went on to found Bumble and bumble in New York. Five storeys on Upper Grosvenor Street quietly produced a whole generation of British hairdressing royalty. I've written a separate piece mapping this family tree, because once you see it, you can't unsee it: nearly everyone traces back to two Mayfair salons.

The fall

Leonard's story doesn't end gently, and I won't pretend it does. The empire faded; there was serious illness, money gone, and long years out of the spotlight. When he died on 30 November 2016, aged 78, much of the public had forgotten the name — while the industry, to its credit, had not. The stylists he made never stopped calling him the greatest pure talent of them all.

Standing in his street

I sometimes walk past Upper Grosvenor Street and look up at number 6. What Leonard proved is the thing I try to live by in my own salon: softness is a skill. Anyone can force hair — with heat, with chemicals, with lacquer. It takes real hands to cut hair so it falls beautifully on its own, whether that head belongs to a president or a girl from Neasden. That's the Mayfair standard. That's the inheritance.

And if nobody has ever taken eight patient hours — or even one properly attentive one — over your hair, you know where I am.

Book a consultation at Zoltan Hair, Mayfair — https://zoltanhair.as.me/

About the Author

Zoltan is a London-based hair texture expert and salon owner with over twenty years of experience behind the chair.