- What is your distinctive feature?
- My feeling of communication and the way I realize it.
- What thing is the dearest for you?
- My health!!!
- What do you mostly appreciate in people?
- Feeling of right of the chosen way and happiness of being the best in it.
- When and where were you the most happy?
- Yesterday, today or always?!!! You see, it is sad to say: I was happy when... You must do everything to be
happy every moment of your life and never look back where as you think you were happy!
- What could you advise to beginning stylists?
- Learn, take as much as you can from people who teach you and try to be the best. Study the profession little by little and in every aspect. Before you learn to run, learn to walk first!
- Your favorite saying?
- Less is more!!!
Every season he presents a new collection at the exhibition of Salon International, where chic, glamour and Haute Couture of hairdressing art naturally combine with the possibility of using it for special occasions and feeling of ease of performance. He is considered the most expensive hairdresser of the world. His schedule is planned for two years ahead as he always travels the world with his master-classes to which professionals applause. It was a very hard problem to get him for an exclusive interview. In life he wins you with his insinuating manner of speech and with playful smile. He seems to be Cheshire cat talking to you if he happens to be invited for a trusting talk. Our talk began during the Championship of hairdressing art in Moscow, continued in epistolary genre and surely it has not been finished yet. So we call your attention to some judgements which will help you take a closer look at this mysterious man, Maestro Patrick Cameron.
ABOUT STUDENTSHIP Not always I have wanted to be a hairdresser. Music and art reigned over my heart and until I was twenty I had been a graphic artist. But hairdressing art had always interested me and one day I came to a hairdresser's in my motherland in New Zealand to attend to some hairdresser's courses and to get this profession. It must be said that my 'experiment' lasted about 8000 hours which I spent as an apprentice, but it was just the beginning, and I refused to consider myself as a student after about eight years of work.
ABOUT COURSE OF PROFESSION When I made a decision to move to London, I did not have any plans like 'What if I specialize in long hair and win all awards in this capacity?!' I just wanted to get more experience. Having reached a certain professional level in the place where you have been working everybody wants to move further, where there is a chance to 'spread their wings'. For me it was London. So I was persistently looking for a job and found one in a well-known hairdresser's and in 1987 I moved to London. After that little by little I became the art director of the hairdressing group Wella. My long experience showed that mastering working with long hair must go on easily and methodically, step by step, as mastering haircut, for example. Everything must be easy, handy, without injuring hair with curling irons and backcombing. But the result must speak for itself and you can achieve it with mastership. When I was only beginning, I wished somebody to share his experience in such step-by-step method with me. So I consider my mission in sharing my experience with youngsters. I like to teach, to travel, to make shows, to contribute in the professional community. You should admit it is a big luck: to do only what you like in you life!
ABOUT IMAGE-BUILDING In the London hairdresser's it became obvious that my constant urge towards making expressly feminine images agrees with the wish of my clients. In everyday life hair must be well-groomed and comfortable. And I always wanted to add more fancy, not to make just a coiffure but an image - glamour and partly provocative. The same my clients wanted, when they were going to have a party or a festival. After all, nothing makes a woman so provocative but an uncompromising feeling of her own attractiveness!
ABOUT ACHIEVING SUCCESS I worked we-e-e hard to make my name wellknown. True success doesn't come at once. In order to wake up being famous, according to the popular expression, it is not enough to come to be in the right place in the right time. It's important, I do not mind, but it is just as important to meet right people. If you are the best hairdresser in the world but you can not communicate and transmit your ideas to other people, you will remain obscure. And the other way round, the ability of communication will not only take you to a new proficiency level; it will also make you popular. For example, I met my business partner Susan Callaghan after a few years of work in London. But that was the turning point in my career for I had joined the association where she held a post of the marketing manager and in the framework of professional community I began to promote my name. And in 1997 I established my own school. That is why my advice to youngsters from the provinces: even if you live in a small town in a needy family, go and ask for a job in the best hairdresser's. Be ready to work without a salary - you should understand that it is you that needs the hairdresser's but not the hairdresser's that needs you. And then, when you start to make a career, do not work for money, work for reputation. Money will come, but really big money will come only with well-earned acknowledgement.
ABOUT WOMEN'S INFLUENCE It was in the 1960s in a small place in New Zealand where I was growing up in a family surrounded with seven girls… Just imagine what my first impressions about women, their ways of self-expression, and their style were! I might say they have stayed with me for all my life. And Lyndsey Loveridge, my tutor, influenced me most of all - from my very beginning in Plymouth in 1981 until now. In fact, it is very important to meet a person who will crack the windows to show the opportunities which spread before you. She is not only a strict trainer who trains hairdressers so that they become the best in their profession; with her example she inspires to be humanly better. That's why she is the closest person to me.
ABOUT MY SHOWS I always build my shows according to the laws of dramatic art: exposition, starting point, middle and final. I have never had any actor's ambitions but I think that I found a way to express my love to the theatre. During my shows I always communicate with the audience. People like it and they understand me in spite of the language barrier and it means that they will remember my show. Besides I have to combine the entertaining part with the training part and my task is to make the learning process nice because… it is nice!
ABOUT DRAMA Moscow makes an incredible impression: I personally see a lot of drama here! It is the history reflected in the architecture, the combination of the history and the present, unpredictable but very inspiring. Every time making a tour of Russia at shows or seminars I could see that Russian masters have a keen feeling of drama. Russian hairdressers have a good "eye" for details; they create harmony between vanguard coiffures and outfits. They make up excellent shows but when I watch them I wonder: everything is nice and magnificent but why is there no communication with the audience? If it were possible to tell about my profession in the drama language, for example in a film… You know, in the life of every stylist there are a lot of stories, and each of them can serve as a basis of an interesting film. But if you ask me I think that it must be a story of success. And here it is very important to observe the way of formation of a creative person: from the provinces per aspera ad astra, as they say. And the culmination would be the moment… I can only express my own feelings many years ago, when I was standing on the stage, having finished my first show, which I had planned and made on my own.
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