ROBERT MAS CAIVE
‘Everything learned is worth learning’ “I am Robert Mascaive and I am proud to be a hairdresser. Thirty years on from when I started, I am still happily doing my job and loving it, in my salon in Kingston, London as well as being part of the broader hairdressing community. I've won many different awards, however my salon won 'The Best Salon' in the UK twice, which I'm very proud of because this is about my whole salon team. It's not about one individual. So that's why I'm very proud about that. And yeah, I love to share my knowledge and all the things that I have discovered throughout my journey, and to me hairdressing is a journey. “The name Masciave is Italian and is pronounced ‘Mashave’ there. I have some family living in Southern Italy, however, I was born and grew up in France and we pronounced it French style 'Masyave', so it's a hot name!!!” “I'm gonna tell you how I got into hairdressing but first I will give you a quote, which I'd like you to remember because throughout my hairdressing journey (my story), you'll see that actually, things come back. And my quote is that 'everything learned is worth learning'. Yeah. It's only when you go through life that you realise that the things that you have learnt may have seen completely irrelevant at that time, but sometime they come back to be very useful to you. I grew up in the northeast of France, in an industrial zone, where metal was the main product that was produced there. So, you know, everybody there at that time would go to college and then learn to work in the metal industry, including me! I love technology so when I started working with metal, I learned a lot about manipulating it, as well as learning about electronics. I learned what you call industrial design and industrial drawing and did that for two years until there came a time when I felt I didn’t fit in. It was the mid eighties and I was a punk and had like, huge spikes in my hair. So my teachers and colleagues looked at me and they were like, what are you doing here? You know you don't fit in. And one day, I don't know why it came into my head that I decided to become a hairdresser. I thought this would be great. And okay, bear in mind, I was only 17 and very naive, so my idea was that I would become a hairdresser and it would be a great job and I could do cool hair and change everybody's hair! Because I thought everybody on the streets looked shit and I wanted everybody to become punks. Right? I started training to be a hairdresser in 1984 and that was part of the punk hair era and all that. I’m laughing because during that time the whole world was going through a deep depression. And there was like a social revolution against the government, which was the punk movement, wasn't it? It was huge in France as well. 16
