Tyson's Roadtrip

He may spend most of his year styling the people of New York and backstage at fashion shows, but this summer Tyson Kennedy was at home, on tour and curious about how things were going back home. He takes us on a whistle-stop tour of New Zealand salons.

For this issue's column I was back in New Zealand for the summer so I decided to go for a road trip, travelling from the bottom of the South Island all the way up to Auckland visiting a bunch of salons around the county along the way. I wanted to get a real snap shot of New Zealand hairdressing.

I gotta tell you I came across some cool salons and met some great people! I was on a summer tour with my band so the morning after playing the Christchurch show I picked up a kick ass six-berth Britz campervan that I had managed to score on a relocate from Christchurch to Auckland – five bucks a day – with my good mates Tim Youngson (Stingsonson) Jake Adams (Radstack), Jake Beers (Rannyfurlbag) and Jonathan Pilkington (Cosmos) who is one heck of a photographer.

We spent the first day racing down to Bluff after a less than early start to the day after staying out a little too late with the locals the night before. We got all the way to the bottom of the South Island by about 2am and woke up on day two right underneath the famous Bluff sign.

We headed into Invercargill and popped into a bunch of great salons. I got a much needed coffee and ended up spending a good amount of time at Venom with Adrian Barclay who is great guy indeed. We worked out that we were both in the same YPS final back in the day in 1999.

I headed back to the campervan and my main man Jake had cooked up a feast of bacon and eggs with a little rocket salad. From there we hit the road stopping in Gore and visiting salons Hi_ B and Runway and then headed on to Dunedin. Unfortunately most of the shops where closed in Dunedin as it was Monday so I gaffer-taped some of my fatboy to the salons’ front doors to let them know that I had popped by.

One of the salons that looked really cool and I would love to go back to visit was Aart On Hair. I had to climb over a fence to get to their front door and got some strange looks from the locals. I have to say, I'm sorry to the owner if I wrecked the wood trim on your front door when I gaffered the fatboy down!

From there we hit Oamaru and Timaru wrecking more doors with our heavy-duty gaffer. By this stage it was midnight so we had to pass on through Christchurch but we had already had a chance to meet some great peeps including the one and only Jerome Wiersma from Vida. We parked up for the night on the Kaikoura coast at about 4am.

Five hours later at 9am Tim got up and, with his two broken legs, drove us in the manual campervan the rest of the way to Blenheim, which had some great shops including Urban Hair Design. We stopped by our good friend Mark's place for some lunch and showers then hit Nelson. All the salons in Nelson where super friendly and Utopia Hair Design was definitely a really nice space that any hairdresser would love to cut hair in.

At this point we all decided that a beer at the pub was well deserved as we had five hours to kill before our ferry crossing at 10.30pm. Unfortunately we thought it would be funny to start ordering rounds of the most ridiculously colourful girly shots we could think of and as a result we convinced ourselves that it was only 45 minutes from Nelson to the Picton ferry instead of the two hours it actually takes. Needless to say we missed the last ferry crossing of the night and slept at the gate of the Interislander. The worst part of this situation was that we were now running late and couldn’t get the ritual coffee at Fidel's on Cuba St.

From Wellington we got straight up to Palmerston North, and I gotta say Palmerston North has some fantastic salons. Every salon I went to was a knockout, and I had always thought that Palmerston North was the most depressing town that I had ever visited. But the sun was shining and people there were actually happy.

We dropped into Fielding and met the great people at Hollywood Hair and Beauty then to Taupo where I thought Chocolate Blonde was a great shop. At this stage it was 4.45pm and we had to have the campervan back to Britz in Auckland by 5pm so there was some serious pedal to the metal. We eventually got back to the Britz depot in the early hours of the morning and as they were all closed up we had to bunk down for the evening until they re-opened at 8am.

We were a little worried because our contract stated that we only had four days and 1200km to get the campervan back or there would be hefty extra costs and we ended up taking five days and clocking up 2400 kilometers but the good people at Britz let it slide. THANK YOU!

It was a fantastic trip that I hope to do again some day with a little more time. Thank you to everyone who was so welcoming to me after I turned up unannounced to your salon. This may not be a very hairdressery column, but I had a great time doing it!

Tyson is a hairstylist at Cutler in New York who has recently launched his first product, fatboy Perfect Putty. He also moonlights as the lead singer of Steriogram.