Marie Pinochiette

When I went to a hairdressing salon in Sydney on my recent vacation, my hairdresser was curious about the coiffeurs in Paris. She had never been to Paris but she had heard all sorts of tales about dogs with powdered bobs and chic parisiennes at the zenith of style, and so she thought that it was inevitable that the salons that snipped and trimmed these fashionable canines and women must be rather fancy.

`No, they are just like here', I said, mainly just to curtail the conversation because I abhor talking to hairdressers, especially on Mondays. But, as she was holding the scissors and clearly wanted me to come up with something, I added: `except that they don’t automatically condition your hair after washing it'.

`What the pickles! Kylie, did you hear that?' she called out to a co-worker, `get this, in France, they don’t condition your hair after washing it. Oh my gawd! How can you get a comb through unconditioned hair!'

`Well you have to ask for them to condition it. And they charge extra.'

`Bloody hell!'

`I know. I was brought up to wash my hands regularly, never to talk with my mouth full and always to condition my hair after washing it. It was really a culture shock for me.'

We then marvelled for a couple more minutes about how weird the French are, and then she said: `I bet you miss Australia'.

The other day when I was at my local hairdresser I thought of other things that, if I'd been so inclined, I could have told that Sydney hairdresser and Kylie. Perhaps it is just a general French distaste for multi-tasking, but every time I go to my parisian hairdresser, I feel like I catch a whiff of the ancien regime.

There is a rigid hierarchy among the staff that goes beyond manager and trainees. I'm transported to the Court of Versailles where the way you dressed exhibited your rank, for example, the longer the train of a woman's dress the higher her rank. At my coiffeur it's black and white. The manager wears a distinctive courtly black, whereas everyone else: the stylists, colourists and hair-scrubbers, must be dressed in unbecoming baggy-white shirts. As if to brand her as a yet more lowly species on the social ladder than the non-manager stylists, the colourist wears a little vest over her white shirt, branded, appropriately enough, with the word "colourist", in case her surgical gloves and the little trolley of dyes she wheels around isn't evidence enough.

They fawn over me like Marie Antoinette in her heydey (perhaps this may have something to do with the fact that it's not uncommon to tip a hairdresser in France), but in the same way that there were strict regulations as to who had rights depending on rank to dress and undress Marie Antionette, here invisible rules dictate who can condition my hair and who can blow dry my hair and who can pass me the magazines. The manager won't just give a simple blow dry but will cut and blow dry, the colourist can't touch the scissors or the magazines but she can wash hair as well as colour it, and then the lowliest of all, the simple hairwasher can offer me a coffee and take my coat, but she doesn't seem to have phone privileges. This means even if she is the nearest to a ringing phone she'll continue with her important task of dusting the shampoo while the phone boils over.

I've been drinking and dreaming so much lately that I don't know anymore what is real and what isn't, what happened and what didn't, what is past and what is present. Am I Marie-Pinochiette?

The stylist, with a wary look to check her manager isn't listening, leans in close to me and says conspiratorially under the click of her scissors: `you know it would probably be cheaper for you if you just bought a bottle of conditioner and took it home with you rather than getting us to condition your hair here.' Instead of giving her a haughty response that of course I already have a bottle of conditioner at home, I nod and think back to that final part of Marie Antoinette's life when she was imprisoned in the Tower. During this period, under the guise of dressing her hair, well-wishers from the outside world passed her potentially useful information, unbeknownst to the watchful guards.