Charlotte Mensah found her calling in 1986. A shy 16-year-old, she’d secured an apprenticeship at London’s first luxury Afro-Caribbean hair salon, Splinters in Mayfair, spending four days a week working under revered hairstylist Winston Isaacs. On other days, she studied Hair Theory at London College of Fashion, where she counted Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney as cross-campus peers.
“There was such a buzz around the area at that time, and learning hair and going to LCF opened my eyes,” Mensah says. “I saw so many businesswomen at the salon who were doing their thing and owning it, which gave me a lot of confidence. Janet Jackson was one of our clients. It was a moment!”
By 1999, with the help of a Prince’s Trust grant, Mensah had secured her own hairdressing space on Kilburn Park Road (“there wasn’t even a shopfront”) before opening her now iconic salon, Hair Lounge, on Portobello Road in 2003.
In the intervening years, she has become one of the city’s defining hairstylists, with an impact that stretches far beyond the salon. In 2018, she was the first Black woman to be inducted into the British Hairdressing Awards Hall of Fame. Her own line of products for Afro, mixed and curly hair, including the cult Manketti Hair Oil, is stocked in prestige retailers like Liberty and SpaceNK. Her debut book, Good Hair, has become a Black hair bible (author Zadie Smith, a long-time Mensah devotee, wrote the foreword for it).
This summer, Mensah’s popular Braid Bar pop-up returns for Notting Hill Carnival in August, and preparations are underway for a September exhibition of photographs and archival imagery at Ladbroke Hall charting her 40-year career and legacy, along with a series of events and talks.
For Mensah, hair has always been about nurturing. Born in London, she moved to Ghana’s capital, Accra, at just a few months old to live with her grandmother until she was 11. Watching her grandma thread her four aunts’ hair into geometric shapes in the 1970s sparked her fascination with styling. When her mother passed away when Mensah was just 13, she took over styling and caring for her younger sister’s hair. “I would copy styles from the beautiful American magazines, like Roots and Ebony, especially cornrows with beads.”
Mensah’s own work now adorns the pages of countless fashion magazines, and everyone from Olivia Dean to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has sat in her chair. She says a pinch-me moment involved receiving an email from one of her musical heroes, Erykah Badu, asking Mensah to work with her for the 2017 Fashion Awards. After hours of deliberation, they settled on a threaded style – similar to the look Mensah was bullied for wearing at school in London. It was an odd, full-circle moment – “something I’d been laughed at for”, she says, “and [then] I put it out into the world and people went mad for it!”
Ultimately, though, it’s her salon – and what it means to people – that carries the most significance for Mensah. “It’s a place to connect and listen to music – I’ve always got a new playlist. We’ve had everybody walk through that door, from the young girl that's just going into sixth form and wants to feel confident, to the superstars, to the lovely Jamaican lady who's been coming in since we opened.”
The CM:CM exhibition will be open to the public at Ladbroke Hall on September 9–13.
ladbrokehall.com
@charlottemensah
This article originally appeared in issue 4 of the Broadsheet London magazine.
