‘Diana sent me filthy cards': The late Princess's hair stylist reflects on the golden years

Telegraph

13-05-2025

Something is agitating Sam McKnight's pet cockapoo Stanley. 'Oh God,' he says in a drawn-out cadence. There are four neighbourhood cats perched atop the fence and Stanley is barking at them. 'They drive him mad!' McKnight smiles, then shoos them away.
We're drinking tea around the kitchen table that looks on to the back garden of McKnight's impeccable double-fronted home. There's a copy of the new memoir by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter on the chair to my left, next to a vase of tulips in primary colours. The flowers, I assume, were plucked from the garden – which for April, McKnight insists, is in magnificent form.
Gardening is his side passion. 'I love the solitude of it,' he says, explaining that it provides the perfect antidote to his day job as a hairdresser. 'On shoots I'm surrounded by people all the time. Gardening is my meditation.'
To call Sam McKnight a hairdresser is to understate things wildly. McKnight is legendary, an image maker who's been a driving cog in the fashion industry's revolving wheel for five decades – an eternity in fashion years. And 2025 is a milestone year for him. He is marking his career's half-century alongside his 70th birthday. In early June he'll host a party at a swanky Knightsbridge restaurant to celebrate both – as well as his MBE, which he received in the King's 2023 New Year Honours list for services to fashion and beauty.
Despite his undeniable status and success, he remains humble. 'Not only is he the world's greatest hairdresser, he is the industry's nicest man,' says Millie Kendall, founder of the British Beauty Council and a friend of McKnight's since the early 1990s.
For today's photo shoot, at which he is the subject, he's wearing a Fred Perry polo shirt and Lululemon shorts with tube socks and Hunter rubber clogs, his limbs a sun-drenched shade of tawny. It is appropriate attire for a keen yogi and gardener but one who is, at his core, pure fashion.
McKnight originally set out to be a teacher. 'When I left school I was at teacher training college and I hated it; I hated being a student.' He quit after two years. College wasn't for him, but hard work is in his blood. 'My dad worked down the coal mine and my mum at the local Co-op up until she retired – we didn't have any money,' says McKnight, who grew up in a village in Ayrshire.
From the age of 14 he worked multiple jobs on weekends and during school holidays. He reels them off: 'I worked in a sock factory, a jeans factory… I was a window cleaner for a long time.'
Eventually he landed a job at a friend's hair salon. 'I was washing hair and sweeping floors to make a bit of extra money. I loved the atmosphere. Hairdressing salons are electric places to work, there's lots of different personalities. And you're learning a skill,' he says with the enthusiasm of a beginner. But the dream was to break free. 'As a teenager the goal, really, was to get your driving licence and get out of town.'
In 1975 McKnight went to London to visit friends, and decided then and there to move. 'If you think things are bad now, 50 years ago London was bleak. The buildings were black with soot… Britain was in a dark depression.' But, he adds, London also had an energy he was keen to soak up. He joined the salon Molton Brown (owned by Caroline Burstein, whose parents founded Browns, and Michael Collis). A trailblazer for natural hair and beauty, it used organic haircare hand-mixed in the basement, attracting high-profile clients.
'We weren't allowed to use electric hairdryers,' recalls McKnight, who learnt to dry clients' hair with his hands and a towel. 'You could get really great movement working with your hands – it's about allowing the natural oils to come through. I still use my hands a lot.'
Vidal Sassoon's influence was beginning to slow. Geometric cuts and the artifice of backcombing were losing ground, which worked in Molton Brown's favour. As the salon seized the zeitgeist, it built a reputation for attracting the best hairdressers, and magazines plucked from Molton Brown's hub of talented stylists for photo shoots. McKnight was one of them.
British Vogue came calling early on. 'Eric Boman was the photographer; we were shooting in the Park Lane Hotel. I remember being absolutely terrified. But I was hooked.' His big break came in 1982, when he received a call from New York. 'An agency was interested in representing me because of the work I'd done for British Vogue. I quickly realised there was actually a business in New York, which there wasn't in London,' says McKnight, who subsequently moved to Manhattan.
Big-budget fashion was a seed that was about to bloom large… and unbeknown to McKnight, he was helping to pollinate the supermodel era. The timing was perfect. His first big US cover was with Brooke Shields for American Vogue. 'I arrived in New York for the early wave of supermodels,' he says. The debate around who was the original super remains unsettled. 'Janice Dickinson always said she was the first supermodel – and she's right,' McKnight insists. 'The term was coined for her – and Iman, Brooke and Patti Hansen.'
By the mid-1980s there was a changing of the fashion guard, and McKnight had a front-row seat. 'There was all this young blood: Patrick Demarchelier, Steven Meisel and Peter Lindbergh were doing this new, loose kind of photography and [models] Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista were coming up at the same time.' McKnight was travelling the globe non-stop shooting for British, American, Italian and 'a little bit of French' Vogue. 'We were on planes constantly.'
McKnight and Demarchelier shared a taste for authenticity. 'I like to keep everything natural and light. I like hair that moves – and Patrick wanted the model's hair to have this reality to it.'
Theatre, says McKnight, is best left for the catwalks. Being one of four hairdressers at the top of the fashion tree, along with Oribe (pronounced 'Or-bay'), Julien d'Ys and Garren, rivalry had to be fierce. McKnight is too polite to say, but he wasn't about to be left out. 'Oribe was doing the Azzedine Alaïa catwalk show, so I remember thinking I needed to do a show.'
That show was Vivienne Westwood. The designer was using British models Naomi Campbell, Yasmin Le Bon and Saffron Burrows. McKnight added international talent to the roster. 'Naomi and I convinced Linda, Christy and Tatjana Patitz to walk in the Westwood show. It was spectacular – those shows went on for 40 minutes.'
Working with Westwood proved serendipitous. One of the first times he met Kate Moss was backstage at a show. 'When she showed up I thought, she's never going to hold her own with those bandy little legs.' He giggles, then finishes his point. 'Kate had this power, you'd never have known she was six inches shorter than everyone else. And that's when people realised it wasn't just about how you looked, it was about the energy you give off.'
I ask Moss for a comment on McKnight's career. The notoriously private supermodel replies within the day: 'I've grown up with Sam. He's done my hair for some of my favourite shoots.' She adds that he is 'a genius with a wind machine, but it is his spirit and laughter, both on and off set, that make him one of my greatest friends.'
The supermodel era, McKnight says, was part talent, part timing. 'They [models] weren't so disposable. They were allowed to develop and come into their own,' he explains. 'Magazines were prepared to take risks and put an unknown face on the cover. That doesn't happen any more.' The cultural significance of the era's '90s peak isn't lost on him. 'We had a great time. There'll never be another moment like it. It's unrepeatable.'
His eyes well up. In 2023, McKnight reunited with Cindy Crawford, Campbell, Turlington and Evangelista during the promotion of Apple TV+'s documentary miniseries The Super Models. 'Mary [Greenwell, the make-up artist] and I had dinner with all of them. It was the first time we'd all been in a room together for 25 years. There were a lot of tears. It was emotional.' He pauses. 'I've got a tear in my eye now.'
McKnight's friendship with Greenwell has endured since the 1980s. 'I first met Sam when he gatecrashed my New Year's party in Paris just so he could meet me,' she jokes. 'We ended up talking all night. Sam is one of four original super-hairdressers – he's the inspiration for all the young hairstylists today.' Greenwell soon moved in with McKnight in New York.
In 1990, Patrick Demarchelier and Vogue fashion editor Anna Harvey summoned Greenwell and McKnight to a studio in the East End of London for a photo shoot with an unnamed celebrity. 'Mary guessed it was going to be Margaret Thatcher, because of all the secrecy.' Thankfully, says McKnight, it wasn't. 'My mum would have been horrified. You can't mention Margaret Thatcher where I'm from.'
In reality the model was stellar. 'Princess Diana comes bouncing up the stairwell,' says McKnight. 'She stuck out her hand with a big smile and said, 'Hi, I'm Diana' – both of us melted.'
Somehow, during that shoot, Demarchelier convinced the Princess of Wales to sit on the floor. 'Patrick's French accent was very strong, indecipherable. He kept saying, 'Sit on the floor bébé. Bébé, sit on the floor,'' McKnight demonstrates, fondly mimicking the photographer. She found the whole thing hilarious. ''He wants me to sit on the floor? [But] I've got a ball gown on.' She was really laughing,' he remembers.
'And that's the picture,' says McKnight, at which point he jumps up and grabs a souvenir fridge magnet featuring the image he's just described: a beaming, bare-shouldered Diana, wrapped in a satin gown with a tiara nestled within her breezy new hairstyle, fashioned by McKnight. 'A friend bought this for me,' he says of the magnet as he places it back.
The photo shoot led to a seven-year relationship between the Princess and the hairdresser, who was at Diana's side for many royal tours, including the one to India in 1992, where she was pictured alone looking forlorn in front of the Taj Mahal. During their early years together, McKnight delicately manoeuvred the Princess away from her fail-safe perm. 'I was back and forth between London and New York working – in between she'd often have a sneaky perm,' he says, laughing. Two years in, she adapted to McKnight's modernity, giving him carte blanche to style her hair as he saw fit, which by the mid-'90s meant a soft and understated look.
Though McKnight is respectfully tight-lipped about what was said between them, their relationship ran deep. 'I loved her,' he emphasises. 'She was so funny. She was so funny,' he repeats. 'She sent [me] these really filthy birthday cards from this card shop on Kensington High Street.'
He must miss her, I say. 'There's never really been a replacement [for her],' he says, quickly correcting himself. 'That's the wrong word. No one has ever fitted into that spot she created, there's been a void there.'
McKnight remains a faithful supporter of the Royal family. 'I think Kate does a great job.' He pauses. 'I think Meghan could have done an amazing job too, I really do. And I thought that was sad, you know?'
These days, McKnight's hair-product business is his bread and butter. He launched Hair by Sam McKnight in 2017 with four dry-styling sprays. 'It's about powerful products that work quickly using the best ingredients in very lightweight formulations,' he says, explaining that 'everything was so sticky, so heavy. I wanted to create something that you could brush out easily.'
The first product McKnight created was Modern Hairspray, a flexible styling spray that has replaced the legendary Elnett in hairstylists' kits. The venture, which has grown to 25 products – including his latest, Pure Genius, a 98 per cent natural scalp oil in a fully biodegradable bottle – was initially funded by McKnight himself. By 2022, he had found investors and hired a CEO, Joel Edmondson, formerly of Deliveroo and McKinsey, with a 10-year plan to scale the business overseas.
It paid off. 'The company is growing at 40 per cent year on year,' McKnight says, admitting 'we're in strange economic times'. Hair by Sam McKnight sells half of its supply online. As for bricks and mortar, it is stocked at Space NK and will soon launch at Marks & Spencer. 'M&S is really exciting for us. Their energy is really good, and no one has the visibility of M&S.'
The plan is to expand in Europe, and then to America next year, a feat that looks increasingly tricky. 'Thankfully we are small enough to be reactive,' he says, alluding to looming tariffs. 'With what's going on it has made me think: 'I'm glad we haven't got a lot of shipments going to America.''
And yet scaling a business is not for the frail. 'I do lots [of things] to keep me active and flexible,' McKnight says, admitting, without any apology, that this includes using the weight-loss jab Wegovy. He has been on the medication for six months and has lost more than a stone, on advice from his doctor. 'Let's not demonise this [injection] because it can be really good. It's made me feel great,' he affirms. 'I tried [to lose weight] before, but I like eating, you know? Life is too short.'
Sugar, he says, is his last remaining vice. He got sober decades ago, after an intervention by his friends Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell. 'I had been out at a party with them in New York and the next day both said: 'You were a bit much last night.' And I stopped, just like that.'
Surprisingly, he doesn't miss alcohol in the slightest. 'I didn't give up because I was an alcoholic,' he tells me matter-of-factly, then adds: 'Or, I probably was… I don't know. I didn't like the way it was making me behave, it was changing my personality – I never drank again after that.'
His physical stamina is sustained through regular yoga, Pilates and circuit training. His thoughts on ageing are complicated. 'I used to do Botox, but it gets to a certain point when it doesn't really do much,' he explains. Then he throws in the possibility of a facelift. 'I went for a consultation for a lower facelift and blepharoplasty [eyelid surgery] with a plastic surgeon the other day. He's 'done' a few people that I know, and they look very very good.'
McKnight doesn't strike me as someone who is chasing youth. 'I do so much filming now and when they catch me from the side… I've got no chin now, I'm losing my chin,' he says, referring to appearances on Celebrity Mastermind and Channel 4's The Big Blow Out, which he enjoyed immensely. 'They [Channel 4] didn't give it a chance,' he says of the show, which was cancelled after one season.
'I'm fine with ageing,' he sums up. 'It [the facelift] will just make me feel better.' But, he concedes, 'I have a horror of not looking like myself.'
Is he miffed that, by launching their own beauty brands, actors and pop stars are muscling in on his territory? 'I think some of [the celebrity brands] are fantastic. Victoria Beckham's is amazing,' he replies.
Listening to McKnight wax lyrical, it is apparent that his unbridled enthusiasm is, at 70, perhaps his greatest business asset. 'What it [his brand] is giving me now is a reason to live,' he says, then clarifies: 'I mean. It's given me a reason not to sit on my laurels and count my roses. And, my God, yes, it's about being useful and engaging my mind in a very different way. Because the other side of my work had become really repetitive.'
Looking back on his career, McKnight has few regrets. 'They were the golden years,' he states unequivocally. 'I've always said it: I had the golden years.'
As I get up to leave, I catch a glimpse of Carter's memoir, which is titled: When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines. I ask McKnight what it's like. 'Oh, I haven't got round to reading it yet,' he says, eyeing the pile of other books beneath it. Something tells me he could have written the story himself.