A wigmaker hanging in by a hair
NEW YORK— Nicholas Piazza keeps 270 kilograms of hair in his Staten Island garage.
He stores it in plastic bins and cardboard boxes, opposite the fishing supplies. “Got greys, got browns, got blonds,” he said. “Got everything.”
Inside one bin, shiny brown bundles nestled around one another like snakes. He picked two thick braids and lifted them from the bin. Uncoiled, they nearly reached the ground. “This is all Russian hair cut right off people’s heads,” Piazza said.
Piazza, 69, is the grandson of Sicilian immigrants, the son of a detective, a tournament fisherman. He does not look like a man who would have an exotic hair collection in his garage. But for decades, Piazza was one of the most sought-after wigmakers in New York City. He made custom wigs and hairpieces for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Brooke Astor and Lena Horne at Kenneth hair salon. He also made the closest thing the world has seen to mermaid hair, creating the long tresses Daryl Hannah wore in Splash.
Much of his hair came from this stash, sourced from around the world, and which eventually outgrew his studio. “I couldn’t close my closets,” he said. “I had more hair than I knew what to do with.”
Piazza is one of the last Old World wigmakers in the city, men and women trained mostly by Italian and Jewish immigrants in the centuries-old trade of hand-tying wigs, a fussy affair that on the patience spectrum falls somewhere between tailoring a jacket and counting the stars. These are not the hot-pink bobs at Halloween stores. They are made from human hair and have intricate hairlines that blend into the skin. To make one requires weaving hair, a few strands at a time, to a lace mesh cap with a small needle, a process known as ventilating. Ventilating a lace wig, which may have as many as 150,000 knots at its roots, takes about 40 hours.
For a quarter-century, Piazza had a studio on 57th Street in Manhattan, once the hub of high-end hair, along with master wigmakers such as the late Bob Kelly, and Raffaele Mollica, who long ago moved his atelier to the Upper East Side. These days, Piazza rents a few rooms in an unmarked salon in Midtown, where he moved when his old building became a luxury highrise and where he works just three days a week, mainly doing maintenance on his clients’ wigs, which start at $3,850 (U.S.).
This may appear to be yet another case of an antiquated craft disappearing from New York. But wigs are far from being swept into the past. The demand, it turns out, hasn’t been as high as it is now since the wig craze of the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Piazza and his fellow wigmakers entered the field. According to Emma Tarlo, who wrote Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair, hair extensions reignited “a frenzied global trade in hair.” Last year, human hair imports to the U.S. were valued at $685.3 million, according to the Census Bureau, up from $51.6 million in 1992. Celebrities such as Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj have made wigs cool.
Piazza was not born with a passion for hair. He grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where he met his wife, Beverly, when he was 16 at an Italian street festival. “I came back from Vietnam, and I didn’t know what to do with myself,” he said. “I became a hairdresser because my wife was a hairdresser.”
The late 1960s was a good time to get into wigs. The fad had begun with the bouffants popularized by Jacqueline Kennedy and the Supremes, which were nearly impossible to achieve without added hair. In stores, hat departments became wig departments. Piazza started working for Kenneth Battelle in New York in 1973, and began a wig business under the Kenneth salon name in 1979. And before long, Piazza began hunting for hair from Italy.
Soon hairdressers and other wigmakers started requesting his services.
“They’d say: ‘Pick me up a couple pounds, I don’t care if you make a few dollars. You’ve got good hair.’ So all of the sudden, I was a hair dealer.”