1 · Position
Jacques Dessange opened his first salon in 1954 near the Champs-Élysées and a second in Tunisia soon after — the first abroad. He became official hairdresser to the Cannes Film Festival in 1961, and launched his name as a brand across ten salons in 1966. The house now runs somewhere between 350 and 400 salons in 37 to 47 countries, depending on which of its own pages one reads.
2 · ⚑ Why the franchise is the entry
Alexandre de Paris flew to a hospital bed for one client — LHL-S-266 Alexandre de Paris — and his practice could not be transferred; the salon was sold in 1990 and the brand in 2002. Carita became a beauty label under L'Oréal. Dessange franchised in 1966 and is still Dessange. Whether a hand can be licensed is the open question of this whole group, and this is the entry that answers yes at scale, with everything that answer costs.
3 · What it invented
The *coiffé-décoiffé*, the deliberately tousled head, which Bardot, Seberg and Moreau wore. And balayage in 1983 — hand-painted lightening, now standard in every salon on earth and almost never attributed. Frédéric Fekkai came to Paris in 1979 as a 21-year-old apprentice here and went to New York three years later to open the American salon before founding his own house at Bergdorf Goodman in 1989.
4 · Candour
⚑ The salon count and country count differ between Dessange's own sites — 350 in 37 countries on one, over 400 in 47 on another — and the entry carries both rather than choosing. A franchised hand is a hand at one remove: the house sells consistency, which is a different product from the thing Alexandre sold, and the Library does not treat one as the successor of the other.