The hairdresser Trevor Sorbie, who was celebrated for pioneering the wedge haircut and inventing scrunch drying, has died aged 75, his company has announced.
The stylist, who frequently appeared on TV and had his own line of hair products, revealed in October he had weeks to live after his bowel cancer spread to his liver.
Sorbie “passed away peacefully with his family and beloved dog by his side”, his team said in a statement on Instagram on Friday. “Trevor’s journey, marked by unparalleled creativity and kindness, has left an indelible mark on the world of hairdressing and beyond.”
Sorbie was a four-time British Hairdresser of the Year whose methods were influential on the world of hairdressing, through styles he named the wolfman, the sculpture, and the wave, and the fast, scrunch drying process.
Born in Paisley in 1949, he grew up in Essex. He had wanted to be an artist, but after being bullied at school he began cutting hair as a 15-year-old apprentice at his father’s barbers in Ilford. “I found hairdressing easy,” he said. “I went from paint to hair, both on a creative journey.”
He worked in a number of salons before opening his first central London salon in 1977, followed by his own range of styling products in 1986.
The wedge, a smooth and sharply angled cut pioneered by the hairdresser in 1974 while he was working at Vidal Sassoon, was the first haircut to be featured in a double-page spread in Vogue. “The wedge captured the spirit of the time and was flaunted in nightclubs around the world,” he said later. “I now understood the power of invention. If I could achieve this once, then surely I could do it again.”
Speaking on ITV’s This Morning last month, Sorbie said his invention of scrunch drying, in which the hair is squashed in the hands while being blowdried, had come about by accident. “At the time you don’t know you were groundbreaking.
“I had this lady with long thick red porous hair. These were ladies who lunch and she wanted it dried with my hands. I said, can I speed this up a bit, and I … just got handfuls of her hair and shook it out, and this hair just came out like a haystack.
“I experimented on different types of hair and it worked every time. Every woman in the world has scrunched her hair.”
He went on to appear frequently on TV and styled a range of celebrity clients, but said his biggest accolade was being made an MBE by Queen Elizabeth in 2004.
Sorbie began volunteering at the Princess Alice hospice in Esher, Surrey, after starting to step back from the salon floor in 2006.
He told the Times “it really unnerved” him when he was asked to cut the wig of a patient for her wedding, but was told she might die before then. “She died the next day, but as I shut the door [after cutting her wig], I remember thinking for the first time in my life: ‘I’m not just a hairdresser, I feel special’,” he recalled.
He then set up the charity My New Hair to support and advise independent salons and stylists on providing a wig-styling service for people with cancer, and helped to draw up a standard for NHS wigs.
