JOE MILLS

BARBER/RECORD COLLECTOR/ROCKER

TEXT BY PETER LYLE

PORTRAIT BY MICHAEL DONKIN

Barbershop, says Joe Mills "almost feels like a dirty word sometimes... or it had become this luxury, oak-clad Mayfair space, this one idea that kept being regurgitated. So when we started thinking about this place, I at least knew what I didn't want."

The hairdresser and sometime DJ is sat in Joe and Co, the men's hairdresser he recently opened in Greens Court, Soho, just round the corner from his established unisex salon The Lounge.

"I always wanted a barber's shop," he says. "I love doing guys' hair. I grew up in Margate in the 1980s and it was all flat-tops and quiffs, and that's still my passion. I came to London, worked in Soho through the '90s, had a great time doing that. Then as our first salon became established, it began to get loads more women customers and kind of softened-up."

Hence the new, men-only venue, which quietly opened last October, in a building that was previously a modern church. Mills set about making "some- thing really clean and modern."

The solution: a geometric, Mondrian-like blue-yellow colour scheme with storage in pale, barely- treated wood and steel, black-cushioned Belmont barber's chairs, which echo the firm's classic designs, but are lighter and more compact, and swivel round so hair can be washed more comfortably.

"The people here are all specialists in men's haircuts, and they're all very particular about what they use - a certain brand of clippers, for example. So it's about taking all those key elements, but putting a spin on them and making them right."

Mills himself still uses the same pair of £400 Japanese scissors he bought back in the beginning of his career. "When I first started and moved to London, they were my first pair of scissors that were decent, in about 1992. It was a real commitment, but you never need to sharpen them if you only cut hair - they're honed to sharpen themselves as they open and close. And once they're shaped to your hand, you don't want anybody else to use them.

Mills' own handsome quiff and close-trimmed back and sides evokes both the current rockabilly moment and the style tribes who bestrode the southeast England's seaside towns in his youth. "It was almost a contradiction itself, the hard rockabilly with the donkey jacket, 'cause you were talking about 15- and 16-year-old-boys bleaching their hair, buying hairspray, and blow-drying every morning to get a quiff."

Since opening Joe and Co, Mills has been surprised at how many men have got into a ritual of a weekly or fortnightly wet shave, having originally conceived the service as merely "a bit of an add-on," and speculates that it's become a treat precisely because most men now prefer to grow slight stubble rather than scrape away at their jowls each morning. Beyond the endurance of the rockabilly quiff, Mills also notes the emergence of a wave of "curly hair, a lot of texture going on, almost '80s- like. Weird Science - we were talking about that as a reference the other day. It's going to be a lot more fun this year. People like Aaron Johnson growing their hair out - a little bit longer, a little bit softer."

That could almost be the title of an Ibiza chillout CD, which is a clunking segue into the fact that many of you will remember Mills as a star name from the glory days of 1990s superstar DJs. He remembers them fondly too, but explains that the sideline didn't ever threaten to overshadow his primary interest in cutting hair. "In '91 I was working in Fish on D'Arblay Street in Soho, so we had Black Market Records, Duffer of St George and Fish all it one road and it became a cool place to go to get your haircut. Then a mate sold me a pair of decks and I started going out raving, and I DJ'd every Saturday for five or six years after cutting hair and I loved it, it was a great time. The DJ thing came about because, with rave, people didn't want to play records; everyone was on the dance- floor wanting to get trashed."

He still likes to pick the tunes at Joe and Co - a rare soul classic here, some Johnny Cash there. "It's called Joseph Mills' selfindulgent mix - all the stuff we wouldn't play round the corner at The Lounge."

For The Drag, more is definitely more. Why use one pair of false lashes when you can use three instead?  His love for makeup started at a relatively late stage in life (most people assume he stole his mum's lipsticks as a child) but as a matter of fact his infatuation began when he met Renaldo the fire dancer outside the brand new Illamasqua flagship store.   Never before had the Drag realised quite how high he could paint his eyebrows or quite how sculpted he could make his cheekbones.   How could The Drag stop at makeup when the new Marc Jacobs Lola fragrance looks so adorable on his dressing table?   Inhaling a large puff of Elnett, The Drag pouts into the mirror and marvels at the pearlised sheen on his tanned shins (St Tropez Mousse of course.)  Some more Glitter perhaps?

Martyn Bal has shown me up. Looking at the images on his website the morning before I speak to him, I notice that he has his new collection modelled by a man and a woman. Are the clothes meant to be unisex? "No," laughs the 34-year-old menswear designer, "That is actually a guy." Sure enough, taking a second look, I can confirm the creature in question is a red-blooded male - albeit one with baby blonde Marilyn Monroe hair and Cupid bow lips.

A stunt to flummox time-poor journalists this may be, but the casting of such an androgynous model also says a lot about Bal's aesthetic - one honed over a decade of working at the biggest houses in menswear, devel- oping his own self-titled line and now (as of June's shows) becoming Design Director at Versace menswear, where the label's legendary house style meets his own distinct approach.

If Bal himself, dressed today in a tight black vest and skinny jeans topped off with a mop of foppish blonde hair, embodies a kind of androgynous men's style, then so do his own-name designs. He launched his brand three years ago and his autumn/winter '10 collection, partly inspired by Teddy Boy shapes, features classic frock coats with quilted leather detailing - perfect for beating up any soft Mods you might find - but also shirts with extended collars and tailored fits that might appeal to those with a more sensitive side. Bal describes his menswear as "constructed, energetic and poetic" all at once. Inspired by music - "I couldn't design in silence" - he says he is "trying to understand what rock 'n' roll means today."

Bal learned about that quest from the best. Graduating from an MA at the RCA in 2000, Dutch-born Bal came home to his London flat one night to find a fax from Christian Dior - one of only two houses to which he had sent his portfolio. He went to Paris for an interview and was hired as design assistant to Hedi Slimane. Staying for three years, he saw the brand transform into the last word in menswear cool, with razor-sharp tailoring, rock stars, youth culture and a skinny-boy aesthetic all thread to its loom. The collaboration worked, Bal says, because he and Slimane come from the same place. "He took me into his world but his world is my world." And, inevitably, the two designers are often likened to each other. "The comparison annoys me," says Bal, "but I have learnt to live with it. Trying to be someone else is pointless."

Indeed, he is a determined person- ality on his own path. He believes in his brand beyond any criticism or perceptions of what a young designer should be doing. "It's been a fight," Bal admits, referring to starting his brand (whose coats, for example, sell for around £1,200) in a recession. "People think my pieces are expensive for a new brand, but I visualise images like a big fashion house. I have always said I would never do my own collec- tion if it wasn't the same as how a big house would do it."

And the world of super-brands is a world he knows all about. Having worked for Burberry Prorsum and Verri Uomo since leaving Dior, Bal is now in charge of menswear at Versace, a role he performs in addition to holding down his own label. He works closely with Donatella - who he praises for her ability to "create teams of people and get young energy into the brand" - and clearly enjoys juggling two very distinct visions of men today. You might even say he is freakishly organ- ised: when we spoke in October, he had already almost completed the autumn/winter '11 Martyn Bal collec- tion, which will not be shown until January. And we can't wait to see what he does for his second Versace collec- tion either. "It's an evolution of what has come so far," says Bal. "I have to find ways to reinvent the concept all the time." Whereas all we have to do is sit back and admire his work.