Courtside Cuts: The Hairstylist Who Pampers Players at the U.S. Open

Julien Farel, with a regular clientele that includes Catherine Deneuve, Kate Moss, Brooke Shields, Sienna Miller, Liam Neeson, and countless other high-profilers, is among the most sought-after hairstylists today. His haircuts command a rate of US$1,250, and an appointment to see him is considered a coveted “get.”

But Farel’s role as the official stylist for the U.S. Open may be his biggest calling card, at least according to Farel himself, who’s had the gig since 2007.

“I approached the Open about having an onsite salon for players at the tournament, and it took me five years of pitching to finally get the contract,” Farel, a native of France, says during an interview at his eponymous salon at the Loews Regency New York hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. (He has a second salon in Palm Beach, Fla.)

The position has Farel and seven employees creating a temporary salon at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens, N.Y., on the penthouse level in a secure area where players can freely walk around without being surrounded by spectators.

The roughly 250-square-foot space is a perk for the 500 or so stars who participate in the Open and offers haircuts, blow-dries, hairstyling, and makeup sessions, manicures and pedicures, Farel says. It debuts for the season two days before the tournament begins and is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. throughout the event. The official dates for the 2024 U.S. Open are Aug. 26 to Sept. 8.

Over the years, his salon has hosted several hundred players, according to Farel, including Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Coco Gauff, and Novak Djokovic. Retired players, including Billie Jean King, whose moniker is part of the official name of the U.S. Open venue—the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center—have also stopped in, Farel says.

“The players make appointments, but if an A-Lister like [Rafael] Nadal or Djokovic walks in, we try to make it work,” Farel says. “We’re busy all day for the entire Open.”

Patrick McEnroe, a retired professional player and an ESPN tennis commentator of the U.S. Open, is a client of Farel’s at his Manhattan salon. McEnroe says that Farel is also a friend, and he visits him at his Arthur Ashe salon whenever he can.

“It’s a hot spot and where all the players hang out and socialise,” McEnroe says. “They love coming to the salon, and it’s a great amenity for them.”

On-site salons for players at major tennis tournaments aren’t uncommon, but Farel was the first to introduce the concept to the U.S. Open, he says. (A representative for the U.S. Open is unable to confirm if this is the case.)

Farel’s experience as a tournament stylist was the impetus for bringing his salon to the Open.

“I worked at Roland-Garros in Paris at the French Open for a decade under my mentor Jacques Dessange, who had an on-site salon there,” Farel says. “I did haircuts and styling for all the big players at the time, including Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, John McEnroe, and Monica Seles.”

Eric Butorac, the director of player relations for the U.S. Open, says that the tournament’s executives offer the salon as a benefit to players because they recognise that they’re under the public eye and need to look their best. “We understand they’re under scrutiny, and we understand the challenge of life on the road, where they’re living out of a suitcase,” Butorac says. “Julien’s salon is well-used and an amenity that isn’t related to a player’s tennis performance the way our fitness centre or nap rooms are.”

Croatian player Donna Vekic, who is fresh off winning a silver medal at the Olympics, takes full advantage of the perk. The star says that she frequents the salon throughout the tournament for blow dries, manicures, and pedicures and also visits the Manhattan location for colour jobs.

“It’s very convenient to have it at the stadium,” Vekic says. “I want to look and feel good when I’m playing.”

And if they don’t hit up the salon during the tournament, some players will stop by when the matches are finished, Farel says. “Many of the players are so busy during the Open that they only get time to pamper themselves when the tournament is over.”

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

Courtside Cuts: The Hairstylist Who Pampers Players at the U.S. Open

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.