This quest for beauty defined Mallett’s life. After landing from Australia at the age of 27, this aesthete was quickly noticed by Emmanuelle Alt and then collaborated with the greatest names in the fashion and photography industries such as David LaChapelle, Paolo Roversi and Karl Lagerfeld, before opening his own salon, the first of its kind, in the shade of an aptly named basilica: Our Lady of Victories. “All the words were right” he says “Cléry, Notre-Dame, Victoires. Three strong symbols that I was in the right way. Everybody kept telling me that I was crazy, but I had to do it. I opened this salon with the idea that if I were to have one, this is where I would like to come.”

His audacity paid off. In 2016, he opened another salon at the Ritz Paris, then a third atop the Webster in New York. “We called it a Marco Polo experience” he recalls. “It was vital that our DNA was solid, and that people felt it. That was really hard to transfer across the Atlantic. We bought the furniture a year before we opened in New York and we put it here so it would smell like Paris. The difference is that the New York salon is run by my closest friend, Mario Casarella and we share the same vision. I don’t sell haircuts. I sell people’s visions and my vision translated into them.” He thus curated a team of “demanding artists” with whom he shares aesthetic goals. “They know what I like and how to achieve it. That’s why we have that nest egg of success.”