For the previous six years, at 8 am sharp, Andreas Anastasis has walked to Anna Wintour’s Greenwich Village city home, the place for about 20 minutes each weekday he maintains repairs, whether or not it’s reducing, coloring, spraying, blow-drying or styling, of probably the most immediately recognizable bob in trend — possibly the world. A brief distance from there, “proper throughout the road from Carrie Bradshaw’s home,” he has spent practically a decade working his namesake salon, the place he now works two days per week. The one journal within the ready space is Vogue.
However again at his loft in New York’s meatpacking district, Anastasis practices one other self-discipline. For this one, he retains the heads hidden.
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Throughout a current go to, plaster casts of muscular backs and thick calves protruded from partitions just like the specters of historical Greek warriors. On a close-by plinth, the breasts, buttocks, fists, forearms and stomachs of his associates and lovers have been strewn about, ready to affix the 47-year-old artist’s sculptural collages. However the busts have been saved principally out of sight, simply off the bed room.
Nothing within the condo hinted at his profession past artwork. Apart from his beloved Yorkipoo, named London, whose fur was pulled again right into a flirty topknot, there weren’t any hints to counsel Anastasis even had one. Which is sensible, as a result of, apart from the odd image on his Instagram feed, he doesn’t speak about it.
Being the hairstylist for Anna Wintour, the highest editor of American Vogue, could sound glamorous, however it’s his artwork follow that will get Anastasis speaking. (Mark Elzey/The New York Occasions)
As the highest editor of American Vogue since 1988, Wintour has lengthy been the topic of public fascination and scrutiny. A fictionalized model of her was performed by Meryl Streep within the 2006 movie “The Satan Wears Prada,” itself primarily based on Lauren Weisberger’s roman clef about her time as Wintour’s assistant, and he or she was the topic of a current biography by Amy Odell, out of which got here a extensively circulated gossip merchandise about her lunchtime Choice for steak and a caprese salad with out the tomatoes.
These near Wintour perceive the significance of discretion. In flip, that discretion retains them near her.
“Anna’s some of the loyal individuals I do know,” stated Anastasis, who has no different common celeb purchasers. “If you go to her residence, virtually everybody working there was there eternally.”
Throughout the early days of the pandemic, when nobody was getting their hair completed — or not less than admitting it — Anastasis continued to indicate up at Wintour’s home as he all the time had, besides that he wore a hazmat swimsuit. After every of her public appearances, he scrolls by Getty Pictures to ensure her hair was correctly patted down. When Wintour travels to Europe for trend reveals, he ships dyes together with detailed directions to make sure that the worldwide stylists her workforce hires preserve her particular shade of caramel blond. And when he’s out of city, he entrusts Lisa Jillian Marconi, a former worker of his who now works at Vidov West salon, with the accountability.
“I’m extra obsessed than Anna is,” he stated. “When it’s not good, I get so mad.”
“His degree of dedication is uncommon and a pleasure to be round,” Wintour wrote in an electronic mail when requested about Anastasis. “At all times there once I want him, at no matter hour of day or night time, and so cautious and meticulous about his work. I really feel fortunate to have recognized Andreas for therefore a few years and I’ve seen his ability, creativity and dedication repeatedly. I get pleasure from my time with him.”
Wintour wrote, “I belief him completely.”
As she ought to. To each query that hewed too carefully to Wintour’s non-public life — Does she meet him with freshly washed hair? Or does he wash it for her within the rest room sink? Does she like to talk? Gossip? Snigger? What sort of music does she play? How does she take her morning espresso? Does she put on her trademark sun shades at residence? What about pajamas? Slippers? A gown? — Anastasis had the identical reply: “That’s between her and I.”
He admitted, although, that folks is perhaps shocked by her heat, “I like working along with her,” he stated. “She’s all the time been so good to me.” In keeping with Anastasis, she has additionally been encouraging and complimentary of his artwork follow. “I’ve photographed her canine and given her the framed footage as presents,” he stated about her goldendoodles. “She completely will get it.”
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On a sunny day in Could, Anastasis was wearing a white tank high and black health club shorts that confirmed off a number of of his many tattoos, amongst them an interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on his left thigh and his identify rendered in thorny cursive lettering throughout his higher again. He sat at his laptop trying to find a video he animated from the slices of his personal MRI.
“I simply have a lot vitality to create. And I’d hold going, too, if I hadn’t run out of area,” he stated.
Elsewhere in his residence, there have been cloudy resin pour work; blown-up images he’d taken with a disposable digicam when he was 15; and a pair of awards for 2 quick movies he directed on the subject of psychological well being,
Anastasis was raised by Cypriot immigrants within the city of Beckenham, Kent. His father, a cobbler, made shoe samples for Jimmy Choo. His mom owned Fiji Unisex Hair Salon, the place older girls from the neighborhood would go for his or her weekly shampoo-and-set therapies. From a younger age, he liked hair: At night time, when everybody had gone to mattress, he’d uncover the Barbie dolls he’d hidden from his two older sisters and provides them braids.
So it got here as a shock when he enrolled within the London School of Vogue’s trend design know-how program. “You already know what’s tousled?” stated Anastasis. “I went into trend as a result of my dad stated solely homosexual males do hair.” Laughing, he added, “Effectively, that didn’t work.”
In his early 20s, after working at one in all Toni & Man’s London salons for a few 12 months, Anastasis moved to New York. He had been romanticizing town since he noticed the 1991 documentary “Madonna: Reality or Dare,” which, particularly given his conservative upbringing, was revolutionary in its informal depiction of queerness. He crashed on a cousin’s sofa in Jersey Metropolis till he saved sufficient cash reducing hair to afford the lease on an attic condo in Murray Hill, a neighborhood in Manhattan, which he shared with a male escort he met on Craigslist.
Anastasis slept on a mattress on the ground, however he might see the Empire State Constructing from his window. “It was heaven,” he stated. By day, he labored as a stylist at Robert Kree salon; at night time, he was a go-go boy at golf equipment akin to Twilo and Limelight. “I used to be doing hair on acid,” stated Anastasis, whose drug use would finally price him his job on the salon. “I’d have a cigarette in a single hand and a blow dryer within the different. I’d run downstairs to do cocaine, after which come again up and burn somebody’s hair.”
When he was 28, he flew again to London to activate his inexperienced card. His mother and father picked him up on the airport. “I used to be actually spiraling,” he recalled. “My mother noticed me and instantly stated, ‘You appear to be dying.’ That’s once I knew I wanted to get clear. And that’s when the second a part of my life started.”
Anastasis returned to New York and efficiently begged for his job again. He additionally discovered spirituality and later embraced veganism. At the moment, he meditates twice each day for 20 minutes, and has weekly telephone periods with an vitality healer out of San Francisco who advised him that in previous lives he’s been, amongst different issues, a medieval astrologer who additionally minimize hair, and who was executed, and his mom’s lover.
“As You Know, I Can Be Fairly Demanding”
Greater than a decade in the past, Anastasis acquired the decision that modified his life. A make-up artist good friend of his stated there was somebody he wanted to satisfy. “I can’t inform you who it’s,” she stated. “But it surely’s excessive profile. Simply present up on the tackle.”
It was Wintour’s. She wanted a blowout.
“I knew who Anna Wintour was, however I wasn’t that invested,” Anastasis stated. He would see her each few months when her longtime hairstylist was unavailable. Roughly six years into Anastasis’ informal association with Wintour, throughout which era she opened a salon of her personal, her stylist retired.
“Sooner or later Anna turned to me and stated, ‘Susan’s leaving. Would you be open to taking up?’” stated Anastasis. “She goes, ‘As you realize, I might be fairly demanding.’”
However he bristled at her portrayal as a ruthless editor. “When a man does what he does, he’s a businessman. However Anna will get such a tough rap as a result of she’s a girl. It’s irritating, he stated. “Pay attention, with out getting too deep about it, I contemplate her a good friend. In my hair profession, she’s unquestionably the spotlight. Even once I retire from hair, I received’t retire from Anna. So long as she’s going, so am I.”
And with them each, her iconic coiffure. “I might hate to alter it,” stated Anastasis. “That’s like Karl Lagerfeld eliminating his ponytail. Or Marilyn Monroe going brown. That bob is who she is.”
This text initially appeared in The New York Occasions.
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