I owe this website -- the idea of it -- to the expressed desire of people from time to time to see more of my work, collected in some broad format. I keep an archive of my tear sheets, of course, videos at one time and now DVDs of the runway collections I've worked on, but I've never set out to keep such a record. A scrapbook?

As I was approaching my 25th year in the industry, longevity as a topic in itself started to creep into mind. Given the opportunities of the Internet and its universality, it now indeed seemed a good idea to pull together, for anyone's perusal, a presentation of some of the highlights of my career via mostly published images. Nostalgia, however, is not the tone I've wished to set forth. For that reason, I've stayed away from chronological order.

As a starting hairdresser, you quickly realize a good deal of your work will not be recorded, or photographed to its best advantage - at least as you understood that while your fingers were in the head of hair. Much of it is only trial, anyway. An excitement ends where another begins, ideas come and go. Sometimes they lay dormant and rise again in somewhat different form than you had tried out before. When your end is ephemeral as it is, that only seems natural. You learn, as you must, to look at the whole picture, literally as well as figuratively, and that's something you continue doing throughout your career.

I can't stress enough how vital is the enjoyment, beyond the mere acceptance, of collaborative effort. There is necessarily only one working vision each time - the photographer's, editor's, designer's, celebrity's, corporate client's, or any one combination of these - but, as a hairdresser, your job is always to please someone else. That is the one constant. Otherwise, there are numerous different considerations with each job, varying even as you go along. You have to be nimble of understanding, develop, even, a sixth sense as it were of what clients need beyond their ability to articulate at the moment. Everyone wants both: to be pleased that their requirements have been met, and to be surprised. I am always glad to be one of a crew, wishing to see all the individual elements and talents come together in a beautiful, coherent image or show. I still feel a certain shiver of gratification in that each time; every time is still somehow a first - the particulars have always varied.

Fashion is the most appropriate arena for me because change is a given, and I become bored with constancy. I would rather risk! The minute something is apparently acceptable, it's time to move on. That's how to stay current, how to develop your craft and evolve within relevance.