Antoni "Antek" Cierplikowski (1884, Sieradz, Poland – 1976, Sieradz, Poland), known as Monsieur Antoine, considered the world's first modern celebrity hairdresser.

Born in Poland, he learned hairdressing from an uncle in Łódź. He moved to Paris in 1901 and began work in the salon at Galeries Lafayette, moving with his fashionable clientele to Deauville for the summers. After much success and with ever increasing celebrity, he opened the Antoine de Paris salon at 5 rue Cambon in 1911. Little more than a decade later, he had a salon in New York City, eventually owning sixty-seven salons in Europe and America. Like any smart modern entrepreneur, he marketed his own hair products and cosmetics, and trained young hairdressers in his methods and employed them in his salons. He dressed the hair of crowned heads and many of the world's most famous women, while living quite a grand and eccentric lifestyle, himself. Twinned highlights of his career came when he supervised - along with a cadre of his skilled hairdressers - the mass coiffing of court ladies at both the 1937 and 1953 British coronations. By the Sixties, though, his star had been eclipsed by a new breed of hairdressers - many of whom he'd trained - and he slipped into obscurity. In 1973, he returned to his hometown in then-still-Communist Poland where three years later he died at the age of ninety-two.


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Photograph by Man Ray, 1933. |
Antoine is credited with, among other things: bobbed hair, the perm, hair lacquer, blond streaks, and the blue or lilac tinting of gray or white hair; in this last he was abetted by his famous client, interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl, who made the "blue rinse" into a popular and long lasting vogue. He was also know for his fantasy wigs, that were very popular among European "fashionistas" during the early Thirties.
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Joséphine Baker, 1933. And below. |
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Brigitte Helm in "Atlantide", 1932. And below. |
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The Honorable Mrs. Reginald (Daisy) Fellowes, 1935. |
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Elsa Schiaparelli in two photographs by Man Ray, 1933. |
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Arletty, 1932. |
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Some of the packaging from his line of beauty products. |
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Wig by Antoine, mask, and Boucheron bracelet - photograph by Hoyningen-Heune, 1932. |