Rita Rusk was not content with simply cutting hair; she also designed new styles and invented groundbreaking equipment, including a collection of scissors. “These have turned out to be my pension,” she told Scotland on Sunday in 1997. “They are exhibited in the Design Museum.”
Rusk recalled that she had been in Toronto for a demonstration on weave cutting, but struggled to get the stylists to achieve the look she desired. “On the flight home I started to draw what I thought would be a good scissor to do the job,” she said, adding that her creation allowed hairdressers to incorporate texture into their work.
“Manufacturers thought I was mad, but these scissors made a fortune,” she said. “When we first showed the weave scissors at a trade fair in Las Vegas, we sold out within two days, making $360,000 and that was in 1984. Then we took them to London and did the same there in two days, making the same amount in pounds.”
Another of her creations was a flattening iron, though she sold the design to the haircare firm Babyliss because she could not obtain patent protection. “If anyone asked me what advice I would give to someone starting off, it would be to invent,” she told the Daily Mail. “Dare to be different.”
Rusk, a curator of her own mythology and the self-styled “first lady of hairdressing”, attended to the locks of the actress Greta Scacchi, the rock singer Sharleen Spiteri and, depending which version she was telling, either the Duchess of York or the Duchess of Kent. In 1987 she was the first woman and the first Scot to be named British hairdresser of the year, sharing the title with her then husband and business partner Irvine Rusk, and on four occasions she was named best hairdresser in the world by the French magazine Metamorphose.
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Her name travelled overseas, thanks not only to her inventions and styles such as the asymmetric perm, but also her commitment to training younger stylists through the Rita Rusk International Hairdressing School. In 2003 she was the first woman to be admitted to the Incorporation of Barbers, which was formed in 1599 by James VI of Scotland to assist surgeons and hairdressers, who were often the same people.
Rusk pushed boundaries. She described devising a Rastafarian-style wig in shades of silver with straw woven in for an exhibition in Miami. On another occasion she created a jungle-themed show with zebra and leopard-patterned hair designs. “When my staff saw it in the morning, they gasped,” she said. “I knew if even they were amazed it was fine.” There were also the caterpillar and the butterfly, styles in which orange, red and copper were applied to the hair then outlined in black.
However, there were also battles to be fought, not least with the tax authorities who in 2009 sought payment of unpaid bills going back several years. Although she tried to bat away the problems with an insouciant shrug, the business had to be sold. Yet the name lives on and Rita Rusk International continues today in Hamilton.
Rusk remained defiant, on one occasion criticising a female MSP who complained about women going into “fluffy” careers such as hairdressing rather than into business. “That’s how I got my first Porsche,” she shot back. “And I’ve had nine.”
Rita Murphy could trace her roots to the south of Glasgow, where she was born in 1947, the daughter of a car salesman. “Growing up in a family of ten in Castlemilk and somebody takes the last slice of Hovis teaches you to deal with disappointment,” she laughed.
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From the age of 13 she helped in her aunt’s fruit shop. However, her older sister, Helen, was a hairdresser. “She looked great and was cool and brilliant. I wanted to be her when I grew up,” Rusk recalled. Reality quickly struck: “I soon found out how unglam it was. ‘Sweep the floor! Wash her hair!’ ”
Having left home at 16, she soon ventured to London where “it was more happening” than in Scotland. Before long she had met Irvine Rusk, a Glaswegian hairdresser who shared her drive and determination. They married in 1970 and bought their first salon in Hamilton, living above the shop. Securing finance was not easy. “Banks were sniffy in those days about hairdressers,” she said.
The business flourished and the couple opened another salon in West Nile Street, Glasgow, where a sizeable bust of Pierrot stood in the window. It was there that Spiteri, now a member of the band Texas, joined them as a junior. “Sharleen was fantastic,” Rusk recalled. “She had incredible hair too, and used to model for us around the world.”
While the hairdressing empire grew, serving 2,000 clients a week and turning over £1.5 million a year, opening a hotel in Lanarkshire in the 1980s proved to be a costly mistake. Rusk and her husband separated in 1989 and he moved to the United States to continue his career in Boston, Massachusetts. She is survived by their son, James, a Glasgow restaurateur. Her second husband was Brian Dorman, a corporate lawyer who died in 2014.
At home, a 14-bedroom 18th-century mansion in the Ayrshire countryside, she was a self-confessed magpie and lifelong collector who found it impossible to throw anything out. One visitor found a living room packed with paintings, sculptures, books and objects that embraced every style from art deco to the avant garde, with models of Barbados river police sharing a space with a lamp from New York, a wooden warrior from Kenya and an original Craig Mulholland chalk drawing.
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Yet Rusk could never stop looking at people’s hair, asking herself what she would have done differently. “Airports are the worst,” she said. “If I see someone with a bad wig, I want to go over and say, ‘I could fix that’.”
Rita Rusk, celebrity hairdresser, was born in June 1947. She died on December 28, 2022, aged 75
