John Frieda, the elegant British hair-care mogul who made his name as a young assistant stylist in Mayfair in the late 1960s, married the Scottish pop star Lulu in the 1970s and then made his fortune in the 1990s by smoothing the locks of curly-haired women with a blockbuster product called Frizz Ease, died on Tuesday in London. He was 75.
The cause of death, at a hospital near his home, was cancer, Gail Federici, his business partner, said.
Mr. Frieda was handsome, reserved and fastidious. He was not given to salon-chair chitchat — he trained his staff never to inquire about a client’s holiday plans — and was possessed of rigorous technical skills. (He had terrific hair, and cut it himself.) He opened his first salon in 1976 in London’s West End, serving the rock stars, aristocrats, actors and artists that made up the jet set of the time: Jackie Kennedy, Mick Jagger, Princess Diana and Diana Ross all graced his chairs.
Shirley MacLaine once sent him a pot plant as a thank-you gift for her distinctive shag. “When I shake my hair,” she wrote on the card, “I display your art.”
Counter to the mores of the times — and to Ms. MacLaine’s thoughtful gift — his salon was not a louche hangout perfumed with the scent of marijuana. It was clean and white and all business.
“Hairdressing had been quite formal,” he told the British Beauty Council, a nonprofit organization, in June 2026. “But the 1960s happened, and the breaking-down of barriers between aristocracy and the working class. In the top salons, the stylists were wearing bell-bottoms with long hair and smoking cigarettes; it was now all very pally. And I thought, ‘No, I don’t want this!’”
Shortly after his salon opened, he heard from the actress Joanna Lumley, who played Purdey, a secret agent with crack martial arts skills on “The New Avengers,” the successor to the original show, which aired for a year starting in 1976. She had seen a photo of a cut and color that Mr. Frieda had done for Vogue; it was a perky bob, and she thought it just right for her character.
“Purdey Mania, the haircut that sweeps Britain,” the tabloids declared, and the salon was booked solid for the next six months.
Mr. Frieda opened another salon in Mayfair in the early 1980s, and went on to open more in New York, Los Angeles and Ibiza, Spain.
In 1988, he got a call from Boots, the British beauty retailer, about doing a line of products. Why not? He had been developing his own styling potions.
He was invited on “Richard & Judy,” a British talk show, where he demonstrated one of those products, a thickening lotion that he had been using in his salon. These were the Big Hair years, and Mr. Frieda was an expert in the genre.
“The switchboard jammed,” he told The Evening Standard in 2001. “Boots sold out. Next thing I get a call, ‘Here’s an order for 1.2 million bottles of thickening lotion and 860,000 jars of wax.’”
He didn’t have a clue how to fulfill such big orders, but happily he had just met Ms. Federici, an American hair-care executive, and they formed a partnership. Ms. Federici, who has wavy hair, also suggested that they create something to tame the frizz of women with curls. Frizz Ease, a silicone-based serum, was their solution. It was so successful that newspapers reported that, at one point, a bottle was being sold every 30 seconds.
“Trade magazines called it the hula hoop,” Ms. Federici said in an interview, “because it just flew out of the stores.”
In 2002, they sold the product business, John Frieda Professional Hair Care, to Kao Corporation, a Japanese company, for $450 million. Mr. Frieda retained ownership of his salons.
“He was such an elegant man and such an innovator,” Linda Wells, the founding editor of Allure magazine, wrote on Instagram after Mr. Frieda’s death. “Frizz Ease alone defined the ’90s. How lucky I was to meet him. The angels are going to have a good hair day.”
Alan Howard Frieda was born on July 5, 1951, in London, one of four children of Hannah Mary (Dochtery) Frieda and Isidore Frieda, who owned a hair salon in Ealing, a neighborhood in West London.
When he was 5, he contracted rheumatic fever and spent a year in the hospital, unable to walk for nine months. Following the tradition of the era, his parents were allowed to visit only on weekends. He was terrified most of the time, he later told The Times of London, speculating that the experience may account for his reserve.
Alan helped out at his father’s salon on Saturdays, but Isidore, the son of a Fleet Street barber who had fled the pogroms in Poland in the late 19th century, wanted his son to be a doctor.
“I became a hairdresser for all the wrong reasons,” Mr. Frieda told The Standard in 2012. “To get out of studying. My father was very angry. But when he realized I was determined, he said I must work for the top salon in London.”
He added: “I probably argued with my father more than anybody, and yet he was the person I loved more than anybody. People would say, ‘Don’t treat your father like that,’ and he’d say, ‘No, I like it when he shouts at me because he gets it out!’”
When he was 16, Alan went to work for Leonard Lewis, otherwise known as Leonard of Mayfair, who was known for giving a young model named Lesley Hornby an Eton crop, as her boyish cut was called — transforming her into Twiggy — and for shearing the heads of the Beatles into their signature mop tops. His first task, on his first day, was folding towels, which he did with the precision that marked his character.
He soon changed his name to John, because there was another Alan at Leonard’s, and stylists, by tradition, go by their first names.
Mr. Lewis noted his new employee’s attention to detail and made Mr. Frieda his assistant on fashion shoots. In the scrum of celebrity, Mr. Frieda met Lulu, the Scottish pop star behind “To Sir With Love” and other hits. When they married in 1976, in a civil service at the Hampstead town hall, Ringo Starr, Tom Jones and Elton John were among the guests who attended the party.
But Mr. Frieda didn’t want to be known as Mr. Lulu, he told The Times. The marriage prompted him to go out on his own. “I would have been humiliated and ashamed for people to think I was living off her,” he said.
The couple divorced in 1991. Mr. Frieda married Avery Agnelli, the widow of the Italian industrialist Giovanni Alberto Agnelli, in 2019; she had been his partner since 2002. She survives him, along with their children, Jackson and Leyla; a son from his first marriage, the actor Jordan Frieda; a stepdaughter, Asia Agnelli Lagrange; two grandchildren; and his brother, Nigel.
Mr. Frieda led a sprawling domestic life, with homes in London and Hampshire, a clutch of properties in Ibiza and a ski lodge in Verbier, Switzerland. He collected works of art by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, read Eastern philosophy — he was once a follower of Gurumayi, whose upstate New York ashram was much in vogue in the 1990s — and founded HAIRraising, a charity that benefits pediatric hospitals in Britain and the U.S.
“The harder you work, the luckier you become,” Mr. Frieda told The Times in June. “No matter how charmed someone’s life may seem, you can’t avoid suffering and pain. And you shouldn’t be trying to, because they’re your teachers.”
He added: “I wasn’t really authentic when I was younger. I was trying to look like I knew what I was doing.”
Karla Adam contributed reporting.
