‘This is where my people are’
Behind Mission Hill salon Vanity Loft there’s a story of community, belonging, and legacy
Arthur Harris remembers the day Pedro Aguirre walked through the doors of Salon Red and Spa on Newbury Street 17 years ago. Harris owned the salon, and Aguirre was applying to become a hair stylist. To get the gig, Aguirre first had to take two tests: a written one, which “he passed with flying colors” according to Harris, and a practical one.
“[Pedro] had his model and he was shaking because I was standing there,” Harris recalled. “I knew just in his presentation that he was talented, but I think that people had told him before that he wasn’t.”
Despite his nerves, Aguirre was hired. Under Harris’s tutelage, the then-24-year-old stylist grew in confidence both in his hair dressing skills and his identity as a gay man of color.
Aguirre, who came to Boston from Guatemala with his family when he was 3 years old, called Harris “the father figure that I didn’t necessarily have.” Harris claims he was “the first Black American gay of Caribbean descent to own not one salon, but two salons on Newbury Street.”
Aguirre said seeing Harris operate Salon Red inspired him to open his own salon, Vanity Loft, in Mission Hill in 2018. Today, Aguirre says, the two men have “come full circle;” Harris now works out of Aguirre’s shop as a private contractor.
“When I watch [Pedro] now, to go from a client who’s got dreads, to a blonde, blue-eyed [client], to a sister who has an Afro kink — he can have all that in a day — that showed me that he loved what he did,” Harris said.
Aguirre emulated Harris’s drive for salon ownership, and determined to do it in the neighborhood where he grew up: Mission Hill (he now lives nearby in Roxbury). He has turned down offers to relocate to Newbury Street or downtown and moved into a larger space in the neighborhood in November.
“I wanted to work with my community,” Aguirre said. “This is where my clientele is, this is where my people are. And I wanted to serve them to know that they could have an experience like they could on Newbury Street, but they can have it in their neighborhoods.”
There is such a level of demand for Vanity Loft’s services that stylists are booked months in advance, customers say.
Rosalva Vargas, a 25-yearold police officer, commutes from Danvers to get her hair done by curl specialist Diana Almonte.
“It’s actually hard to find curly hair [technicians] for my textured hair,” said Vargas, who has been a customer since 2019. “There’s not a lot of them, and normally they’re in the city just because that’s where more of the culture is in reality. Not everyone can do curly hair. I found [Diana], and then I just kept coming to her because she does wonders on my hair.”
Almonte, who also worked under Harris as a styling assistant at Salon Red, called the journey many of her clients go through to find a specialist “very emotional.”
“I feel like clients are more appreciative because most of the time you go through life and you don’t understand your hair and you’re trying to fight with it and straighten it,” said Almonte, who added that most of her clients only come in a handful of times a year because in addition to cutting their hair, she teaches them how to properly wash, condition, style, maintain, and dry it. “There’s some people who don’t even realize their hair is curly.”
Not only do customers come to nurture their hair, but themselves as well.
Julise Gibson, 30, who lives in Brighton, gave birth to her first child eight months ago. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, she sat in Aguirre’s chair for her first hair appointment since becoming a mother.
“I just was needing a little extra TLC, and I knew I could come here to Pedro and he’d do that for me,” Gibson said. She’s been coming to Aguirre for three years, and said she comes to Vanity Loft because “it feels like I’m walking in and I’m seeing family or good friends. I feel like I could come in here and I don’t have to put on another face. I don’t have to code switch. I can just come in and be who I am.”
Vanity Loft’s homey environment is nourished by the ambiance of the space. Natural light pours in from body-length windows, accentuating the black-and-white industrial aesthetic of the salon, which is complimented by colorful street art. R&B hits like “Just a Friend” by Mario play in the background while the sound of scissors snipping and belly laughs shared among old friends also fill the air.
On the desk of Aguirre’s station, close to a small picture of himself, his partner, and their daughter at Machu Picchu, sits a red plastic table tent that reads, “I’m not your therapist.” Despite this humorous warning, Aguirre said he recognizes Vanity Loft’s services can be a self-care tool for clients.
“It is therapy because people sit down, they relax, and that’s when they open up,” Aguirre said. “We know things about our clients that sometimes they don’t even tell their spouses or their parents or anything, and that’s huge. It can be exhausting, but I think it’s beautiful because as a community it also helps us heal.”