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A hairdresser’s best attribute, says 85-year-old Dante Alessio, is the ability to listen. And customers have aired all manner of life’s ups and downs in his home salon over the past 55 years.
“We were their confidants,” he said.
One day, a 75-year-old client amazed Dante and his wife Rita by announcing she was getting married. After being single all her life, the client had met a lovely widower at her retirement village.
The Alessio’s did her hair for her wedding, and attended the ceremony at a Preston church, which was beautiful, Rita said.
Now, as he prepares to retire after a remarkable stretch of 74 years in the trade, Dante says it’s the people he will most miss.
Opened in 1971, the Alessios’ salon, Dan’s Hair Cuts, sits at the rear of a brick veneer home on Darebin Road in Thornbury. With a barber’s sign out the front, the house is a local landmark.
For decades as they raised their four daughters, Rita would wash clients’ hair, sweep the floor, answer the phone and make coffee while Dante cut hair.
But on April 18, the house will go to auction, marking the end of an era.
Ken Barbuto, who lives around the corner, said he will miss “ducking in for a trim” and having a chat about Italy and “what we’ve been up to”.
“The first time I walked in here was like walking into a bit of history,” Barbuto said.
Bev Maskill, a customer for 45 years, comes every week for a wash and blow dry. “I sit there and have a bit of a laugh and a chat,” she said. “Dante and Rita are my friends, not business acquaintances.”
In the early days, the salon was known as Dante Coiffure, and most of his customers were women. With perms in vogue, he spent hours setting hair in rollers, applying smelly chemicals, and washing and drying. There was also blue rinses, and “sets” – where hair was washed, styled, dried and combed.
The salon’s changed its name to Dan’s Hair Cuts around 1990 and over time, the clientele has also changed too. In 2026, Dante says over 95 per cent of his customers are men who mostly get $25 cuts.
Most are regulars. “I know what they want, they don’t have to tell me, and they’re happy,” Dante says.
Growing up in Buja, in north-eastern Italy, Dante started hairdressing in his father Ettore’s salon in 1951, when he was just 11 years old.
A year later, Ettore left for Australia, with Dante and his mother eventually joining him in 1956.
He and Rita married in 1964, and seven years later when Ettore retired, the couple opened their Thornbury salon.
Though Dante has said he intends to keep working until the property’s settlement, the Alessio family is still deciding what to do with the salon’s equipment, which includes three vintage hair dryers.
One of Dante and Rita’s daughters will keep a barber’s chair that Ettore imported from Italy, and which dates back to 1928.
Kew resident Cath Whitehead told The Age that her family had been getting their hair done by Dante and his father, Ettore, for four generations.
“It’s sad,” Whitehead said. “Dante is such a hard worker. He was always caring, interested in what was happening in everyone’s lives, and strived to do excellent job.”
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