For the love of hair

By Dina Azzolini

Over the course of thirty years, Dina was the star of hair stylists, the legendary coiffeuse of Consuelo Crespi, Anna Piaggi and Mina, and a magnet for artists, photographers and designers drawn to her original and inimitable imagination.

Born in the Emilian countryside, she starts working at the age of 10 as the piccinina (shop assistant) for the village hairdresser. As the 1950s draw to a close, she moves to Milan at the age of 17 to attend the Hairdresser Academy, and with her father’s help, takes over her instructor’s small shop on what was then called Vicolo della Spiga. It’s the beginning of her inexorable rise.

Her arrival in Milan coincides with the birth of Italian fashion, which fills the city with a vibrant and electric atmosphere. Designers like Versace and the Missonis vie for her creations, as do the leading fashion photographers, including Helmut Newton and Gian Paolo Barbieri, with whom she develops an extraordinary professional rapport. And then suddenly, at the peak of her success, Dina leaves it all behind. In 1978, on the leading edge of a rising wave, she abruptly rejects hair coloring, permanents and setting hair, in favor of a natural approach to hair care. In so doing she invents the ecology of beauty, and ushers in the New Age of hair. It is her umpteenth and most significant success.

Dispelling the illusion that hair color can change a person’s life or give them a new identity, she offers treatments that bring a deep sense of internal harmony by encouraging her clients to accept themselves, even when their hair begins to turn grey, arguing that hair is a bodily organ and, as such, must be listened to and respected.

In this book Dina reveals her secrets. It’s a precious record of her passions and memories, but also an entertaining account of events, bound by the delicate thread of the love… of hair.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dina Azzolini
• Release date: Mar 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9788835392361

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND (DIGITAL) EDITION OF THE BOOK

The publication of this second edition of the book coincides with several new initiatives: the founding of the Dina Azzolini Cultural Association, the first offering of my new course to teach the Hair Wellness Cut, the updating of my Facebook page, and the launch of my new website.

All of these projects spring from my ever-growing desire to promote the vitality, freedom, autonomy, humanity and competence of high quality artisanship. My wish is to create a network of professionals who are willing to forego the use of products marketed by multinational enterprises in order to rediscover their own self-sufficiency and creativity – artisans who are able to see in their own hands a value far greater than what any product or technology can offer.

Writing and updating this book has been a delightful and useful experience. More than anything, it has served to validate my convictions by attracting many persons who have placed their trust in my hands. They have been rewarded by rediscovering the pleasure of their own beauty, and breaking free from the tyranny of fashion and invasive treatments. The book has also brought me into contact with other hair professionals who are interested in knowing more about my method – the Dina Method. It was precisely to cultivate and deepen my interaction with this network of colleagues that I created the Dina Azzolini Cultural Association, which promotes cultural activities, training initiatives and information, and creates a network of hair-care artisans who choose to follow the principles, techniques and philosophy of my Method.

The Dina Azzolini Cultural Association is a non-profit association founded in 2019 with the support of friends and associates who appreciate me and value my work. It was launched in September of that year under the auspices of the FAI ( Fondo Ambiente Italiano – the National Trust for Italy), in the wonderful setting of the Villa Necchi in Milan.

What drives my ongoing struggle to defend quality artisanship is the perception that our country not only neglects and fails to support it, but actually blocks it through fiscal and bureaucratic obstacles. Even a short stroll through our cities and towns will reveal just how many storefronts that once touted all manner of local goods and services, have been shuttered. In their place, the illustrious brands of multinational enterprises have moved into our historic buildings, spoiling our neighborhoods, streets, environment and social fabric. I see it as a civic duty to preserve artisanal crafts and trades, to promote them, and to bring them to the awareness of the younger generations. This is what drives me to educate and train new artisans in the wonderful field I work in, a field which allows me to interact deeply with people, and where the key concepts that guide me are respect, health and beauty.

The first of the Association’s scheduled activities is a refresher course that focuses on the Hair Wellness Cut. This is a unique and original treatment that I developed over the course of 70 years of experience. It strengthens the structure of the hair, eliminates split ends and makes hair softer without the use of products and without any contraindications. Magical is not too strong a word to describe what it feels like to use scissors and one’s own hands to make hair healthier and happier.

In closing, I express my gratitude to the FAI for its support for my efforts to preserve and promote the development of high quality artisanship, through which I hope to realize my fondest dreams.

For more information, please follow me on Facebook @laDinaMilano or on Instagram @ladinaazzolini

Thank you for your interest in my story. I wish you much happiness.

Dina

Milan

February 2020

My hope is that this book

Will help the reader

To see hair

As something more than

An esthetic effort

To conform with

The fashion of the day

for Francesca

FOR DINA

by Gian Paolo Barbieri [1]

Dina will forever be linked to one of the most beautiful periods of my life, a time when unbridled creativity filled each day with new stimuli, discoveries and achievements. Milan in the 1970s was witnessing the birth of Italian fashion, and the quest for innovation infused the city with an electric vibrancy. Evenings would find everyone gathered at the Nepentha; it wasn’t dancing and champagne that brought us together, but the need to talk about our plans, our dreams. Ferré was there, as was a somewhat shy Versace. And so was she, Dina of the fiery red hair, the rustic Emilian accent, and ideas that bubbled up like boiling water. She was an artist even then, and not only because she wrote poetry, but also because she worked on hair the way a painter works on canvas. Her shop on Via della Spiga was like a Renaissance laboratory, an experiment in creativity, where one walked on an extraordinary flooring that seemed to reproduce the colors and feel of water.

I can’t think of that place without remembering the scent of flowers and botanicals that transported you even before you stepped into the elevator – so far from the harsh and nauseating chemical smells that were typical of the salons of other hairdressers. She was focused on health, used only natural products, and had a sterilized brush for each client. And when you left her shop, your hair felt light and fresh, the way it did when you were a child, causing distant memories to come flooding back. Like that of my father teaching me to swim in the Naviglio between Corsico and Darsena. Unthinkable today, but in my childhood those waters were clear and full of fish and transparent algae.

I would argue with Aldo Coppola, Milan’s other hair artist in the 1970s, who couldn’t accept that I went to Dina – and not to him – to cut my hair. But I had a deep professional bond with Dina. We worked, even on Sundays, on photo-shoots for fashion magazines. We worked for hours on end without ever thinking about the time. And she was the only one who managed to style hair under the breeze that blew from the fans I used to give the model’s hair a sense of motion. I don’t know how she did it; her thumb would curl around the brush and, as if by magic, the hairdo would withstand the wind. Dina was imaginative and determined. She could spend hours upon hours at the library studying the hairstyles of different periods, and yet was always ready and able to give me whatever I needed for the images I had in mind. She especially liked to decorate hair with flowers, as you can see from one of the photographs included in the Palazzo Reale’s 2007 exhibition of my work.

Dina has always held beauty up as an ideal, and I think it is this that we have in common, that has underpinned our friendship through the years, even when our professional paths have taken us our own separate ways.

But some things never change. As soon as I get back to Milan from another of my trips to far-flung locations, I go to her to have her do my hair. And always I find her enthusiastic and as fierce as ever, in love with her work, and yet leaning into the future in her constant search for better ways of caring for hair. She reminds me of Lady Liberty, marching confidently onwards with her torch, without a thought as to whether anyone is following in her wake. This book will bring her story to many who have not had the privilege of knowing her. It will inspire them, I hope, to adopt new ways to care for and to love their hair.

[1] Fashion photographer

PART ONE

My story

My early years

I was born in 1939, at home. My mother hadn’t turned 18 yet. I’ve never known why, but she always liked to say that I was almost born under a tree. Although the midwife was there waiting, and my mother was already feeling the pains of labor, she had been raking leaves and didn’t want to stop until she’d finished her chore. The month was September.

The shoes I wore up until the age of four, whether in summer or winter, were made out of cloth by my mother, Alfa. She was the one who decided how I should dress, until I left for Milan at age 17. She dressed me like a doll, with skirts and petticoats. She even made me enter a local beauty pageant that was held in a ballroom. I wore an orange dress – me, who would rather have dressed like a boy. I won the contest.

I was lonely as a child, the only daughter of poor folk from the Emilian countryside. The nearest house was over a kilometer away. My only friends were two brothers who I saw only in the spring and summer, because we lived too far apart to meet during the colder months. Their favorite game was to say mass, which I thought was really boring. As it turned out, they both became priests. The toys I played with during the war were those I had made myself. I used a sprocket (a polished wooden cylinder that cotton was wrapped around to make sewing thread) and wire to make little toy cars. I also played with the piglet that most farmers usually had around. The sad day – the day of the piglet – inevitably came when it got big enough and was slaughtered. It was one of the few and much anticipated feasts among the country folk, and it was the occasion for my mother’s father – Guido Luppi, called al Lupi in our dialect – to welcome home his many children and relatives. My maternal grandfather had two cows, the pig, a few hens, and a melon patch that we would check on to see when the melons were ripe: we’d tap the rind with our fingers and would know it was time to pick them when they sounded full. I can still smell