Meet the super stylist tha
It’s 30 years since opened his first hair salon. Here he tells us about styling supermodels, his showbiz pals and how it all began
SITTING at a wooden table in his white-walled office hidden in the eaves above his luxurious salon in central London, Charles Worthington is reeling off a list of the famous tresses he has tended to over the years.
From styling actresses Sharon Stone and Emilia Fox at the Baftas and Diana Ross for the Met Gala to working with the Sex And The City cast and persuading supermodel Erin O’Connor to chop off her long locks, Charles’s client list reads like a who’s who of showbiz. “I cut Jerry Hall’s hair on the balcony of my home in St Tropez, overlooking the ocean. She’s great fun,” he says.
Charles, 58, who lives in Chelsea with his partner Allan Peters, is celebrating 30 years since he opened his first salon. He now has three London outlets that attract 2,000 clients every week.
Not bad for a man who trained to be an architect in the late 1970s but left his studies in York to sweep the floors of a London salon.
“I started at the bottom,” admits Charles, who says the backing of his parents gave him the confidence to follow his dream.
“They were very supportive and knew architecture wasn’t for me. I had friends in fashion and wanted to do what they were doing.”
However his three years training to be an architect were by no means wasted.
“Architecture is about shape, balance and form and that is exactly what hairdressing is about,” he says.
“Hair is architecture for the face, it can make it slimmer, longer, shorter, rounder or squarer.”
Charles opened the doors of his first salon in central London in 1987 and used to hand out flyers at Tottenham Court Road tube station to drum up business.
Before long TV presenter Jonathan Ross and actress Cybill Shepherd were clients and he was styling shows for Betty Jackson and Jasper Conran at London Fashion Week.
IN 1995 he launched his first product range, which he then sold in 2004 for a record sum. Charles spent years working on television for BBC’s The Clothes Show and as the resident hairdresser on ITV’s This Morning.
He won British Hairdresser Of The Year in both 1993 and 1998 and in 2015 was given a lifetime achievement award by the Fellowship of Hairdressers.