By SUSAN DOMINUS
It was clear that Sunday was shaping up to be a rare shot of Indian summer, the ideal day for wandering through a park or lazing around on stoops or eating outdoors. But Theresa Cheung, 27, a fashion designer, had somewhere to be at 9:45 a.m., and a warm, golden day would not deter her. Freakishly perfect days are hard to come by in November, but they’re probably not as hard to come by as a good, free haircut at a New York salon. They’re also not as useful on a job interview.
A few days earlier, Ms. Cheung was leafing through Time Out New York magazine when she noticed a write-up promising free haircuts at the Cristiano Cora studio in Greenwich Village to anyone who brought proof of unemployment, sort of a public service to style-conscious job seekers. Ms. Cheung researched the salon, which got strong reviews online, and where haircuts start at $100, and imagined there would be a mob scene — women with expensive handbags but telltale split ends, out-of-work designers she had run into on interviews, unemployed fashion editors, not to mention every diligent coupon-cutter in town. Instead, she was second in line, with only a few people behind her. By 10:10 a.m., Ms. Cheung was in a stylist’s chair, chatting about the plight of her career and her hair.
If only job hunting were this easy: Do your research, show up early, catch the worm. Ms. Cheung, who was a lingerie designer until she was laid off four months ago, has not found the search to be all that easy. She has cut back on all the nonessentials: the dinners out, the fancy bread, the $200 cut-wash-dry-hot oil treatments of yore (alas, color and other services beyond the scissors were not free at the salon). She had not had even a trim since March, and those wispy ends of her long, dark hair were starting to get on her nerves. They say you should never let them see you sweat — they should also never see you brushing hair out of your eyes.
For someone down on her luck, Ms. Cheung looked fairly radiant as a stylist showed her how her new bob could go from corporate to punky with a few strategic tousles. It was not just the good haircut that was improving Ms. Cheung’s mood. “It’s good to know you’re not alone — to be around people who understand your situation,” she said. And not just any people — people who looked, by the time the stylists were finished, like they had little to worry about except making sure no one messed with their hair.
Around the sleek, white room, the people who showed up for the event, held on Sunday and Monday, to have their hair done spoke of a common theme: change. “I’m trying to reinvent myself,” said Carmen Ramirez, 39, a former fashion buyer from Washington Heights who is going back to school to learn medical billing. She had not had her hair cut professionally for a year, and it had grown to her waist. “This is starting the change process — getting a new cut,” she said.
Cristiano Cora, who usually charges $300 a cut, was working on the long, dark locks of Hanan Zdeg, a painter and single mother who got by mostly on retail clothing sales until that work dried up. “I’m just hoping for a transformation,” Ms. Zdeg said. Into what, exactly? “A pretty woman with easy, manageable hair.”
“You’re already pretty,” Mr. Cora assured her, sounding surprisingly paternal for someone with avant-garde sideburns. “Tomorrow you’re going to go out and look for an interview and get a job.”
It’s the Lily Bart dilemma Edith Wharton spelled out in “The House of Mirth”: To gain access to wealth and fashion, one has to keep up appearances, but keeping up appearances can be impossible unless you’ve already got access to wealth and fashion. Mr. Cora and his staff, as well as some other stylists he had trained, were trying to help the clientele, many of whom worked in fashion or theater or marketing, sidestep this conundrum. Call it the good-hair school of economics. “We’re trying to prepare them so they can get working and feel good and come back into salons,” said Jeanise Aviles, a stylist working on Ms. Ramirez’s hair. “Our business has slowed down, too.”
For Andrea Friedland, an out-of-work marketing executive, a large part of the pleasure would come from telling her husband his cynicism was unjustified. “My husband said nothing is free in New York,” she said. “Now I can go home and say, ‘You’re wrong!’ ”
Her husband thought maybe his wife would arrive to find students cutting hair. But even if there had been, how bad could their work have been for zero dollars? After all, it’s only hair. It grows back. If only the job market would.