Some of the best-known personalities of contemporary history have passed through the hands of Lluís Llongueras (Esparreguera, 1936). Characters as diverse as Isabel Preysler, Queen Sofia, Bianca Jagger and even the iconic artist born in Figueres, Salvador Dalí.
Converted into a highly versatile media star, the sad news of his unexpected death at the age of 87 from throat cancer, yesterday at his home in Barcelona, shook the fashion, beauty and arts industries.
Born in Esparreguera (Baix Llobregat), his great talent and multidisciplinary character earned him a recognized place in the star system. Some of his most iconic hairstyles were worn by aristocrats such as the Duchess of Alba, to whom he had the idea to give her his famous perm, or Queen Sofia and the infants Elena and Cristina. Those eighty carded locks were his work.
He started by sweeping the floor of a hair salon until one day he decided to take the plunge and cut the hair of his aunt, who was his first customer, and began a career that would lead him to become a professional called to revolutionize the world of hairdressing in Spain. Although his name became world-famous thanks to his eponymous chain of hair salons, this was only a small hint of everything that made up his vast creative universe, as he also expressed his artistic inclinations through modalities such as drawing, painting and photography.
In 1958 he fulfilled a dream by opening what would be the first of many hairdressing salons in the city of Barcelona and in 1972 he inscribed his surname in the history of the country after opening the first unisex hairdressing salon in Spain.
However, the success of his professional career was not accompanied by a good family relationship. The scandal landed on the private life of the iconic stylist, who divorced his first wife, Lolita - with whom he had three children -, after it was known that he had a double life with another woman, with who also had three children. After breaking up his first marriage, the stylist returned to the altar in 2006 with the one who has been his wife to this day. "I am not inside the thinking of my children. If they don't respect me, that's their problem. We only live once and the woman I love is called Jocelyne Novella, with whom I have three children", explained Llongueras in an interview in 2010 for Vanitatis. That same year, the news that the hairdresser's daughter had fired him from one of his companies via a burofax appeared in the media. A new family drama to which he decided to remove iron despite admitting that he did not speak to the children he had with his first wife: "I am tremendously well, this was an incident, an unimportant move for me. Someone has made a mistake", he said.
