Eighteen years of styling hair for celebrity clients attending The Met Gala, which this year takes place Monday, May 4. Just as many years working with fashion houses for Fashion Week in New York, London, Milan and Paris. And three years of styling hair for ballerinas attending New York City Ballet’s Spring and Fall Galas. (This year’s Spring Gala will be held Thursday, May 7.)
For New York City-based Marcos Diaz, being a freelance hairstylist for some of fashion’s and the arts’ biggest events is high profiled and thus high pressured. And yet, he seems to have been born for it. In addition to exuding a serene joy over the phone, he’s also had perhaps the perfect, and perfectly improbable, training for his high stakes career – firefighting.
It taught him how to work calmly when time is of the essence. And something else.
“Each moment is important to someone,” he said. “When we’d show up at a fire, it was the worst moment in someone’s life.”
Now he shows up for some of the best moments in people’s lives, and, he added, “I take the same skill set I learned in firefighting.”
Growing up in Laguna Beach, California, Diaz said neither firefighting nor hair styling was on his radar. But an aunt and a cousin worked for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and Diaz developed a fascination with law enforcement. As a 14-year-old student at Aliso Niguel High School in Aliso Viejo, California, Diaz became a cadet with the Laguna Beach Police Department, learning how police and firefighters operated. It quickly became clear to him that he was temperamentally better suited to the latter.
“The only way I can put it is that I’m more of a Golden Retriever than a German Shepherd,” said the sunny Diaz, stressing that both jobs require physical and mental strength.
He studied fire science at Santa Ana College in Santa Ana, California, and then trained with the Laguna Beach Fire Department before joining the United States Forest Service, part of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). For six years, he worked 10 24-hour shifts a month.
“It was difficult, but I loved every second,” he said. But that grueling schedule also gave him 20 days off a month, time enough for a related job – or something different. At the station, firefighters would watch such shows as Bravo’s “BlowOut,” a reality TV show that revolved around the 2005 creation and launch of celebrity hair stylist Jonathan Anlin’s then Jonathan Salon in Beverly Hills. Hooked, Diaz had found his side gig and cold-emailed the show’s salon manager, only to be told he needed actual training.
He went to hairdressing school, keeping in touch with the program. One day, he received a call to join the series’ third season. From there he moved to the Big Apple and went to work for Bumble and bumble, a hair product and salon company whose name he readily found in the credits of the fashion magazines. Three months later, he was at New York Fashion Week, an incredulous smile on his face, he said, like that of Forrest Gump at the White House in the movie “Forrest Gump.” Diaz was on his way.
Being a hair stylist, as the archetype goes, is like being a therapist who does hair.
“One of the things I enjoy most is connecting with people,” he said, adding that especially for celebrity clients it may be just as much about having someone to talk with in the green room, or performers’ lounge, before they head onstage as it is about hair.
But for his male and female clients – who have included Sienna Miller, Katy Perry, Hailey Bieber and Oscar winner Rami Malek – it’s also about the hair and the trends the stylist needs to be up on. Nothing is hotter today, Diaz said, than the quiet luxury of the 1990s look embodied by John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. That includes not only her elegant, understated blond chignons but the accessories she used, such as the C.O. Bigelow tortoise shell headband.
Despite his achievements, Diaz said “success is not a grand finale. There was ‘Rocky’ and then ‘Rocky II’ and ‘Rocky III’ and so on.” He’s always on the hunt for the next client. Being on the go suits his high-energy nature.
It’s one that also savors sharing the gifts he has and reveling in those that have come his way.
“Some of the most exciting things in life are the most unexpected.”
