Mrs. Evansky took quiet pride in getting women out from under the sizzling heat of the dome, and in the durability of her invention. “I always look at the prices of hairdressers now, and I say, my God, it’s still there: ‘blow-dry,’” she told an interviewer for the beauty brand Space NK in 2013. “How wonderful, 50 years later.”

She was born Rosel Lerner on May 30, 1922, in Worms, south of Frankfurt. Her parents were immigrants from Poland. In 1938, when the family was living in Ludwigshafen, her father was arrested and imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp. Speaking only German and Yiddish, she was sent to Britain on one of the last Kindertransport trains that carried Jewish children out of Germany.

She lived briefly with a family in Dudley, in the West Midlands, before moving to London, just in time for the Blitz. There, she apprenticed for a barber in Whitechapel, and distinguished herself with her zeal.

“I worked and practiced till late at night on anyone who’d let me get at their hair,” she wrote in her memoir.

As World War II raged, she embarked on her career, finding work at a salon near Regent Street. In 1943, she married Albert Evansky. When their marriage ended in divorce, her husband bought her share of the business. He sold it in the early 1980s.

What Florence was to painting and sculpture during the Renaissance, Mayfair was to the art of hairstyling in the 1950s and ’60s. Mrs. Evansky sat atop the heap, the lone woman in a field monopolized by men. In “Vidal: The Autobiography,” Vidal Sassoon called her “without question the top female stylist in the country and the equal of any man.”