Alisa Paganis first worked at Salon Elia in Riverside at the age of 10. For three years, she swept the floors, answered the phones and shampooed customers’ hair. While most children wouldn’t dream of working in a hair salon, Paganis, as the owner’s daughter, had little say in the matter.
“It was not always fun because I was the oddball of my friends. I had an immigrant dad who expected me to work, so I didn’t really have a social life, but I did have a rich social life within the salon,” she told the Landmark Thursday. “Although I felt like I missed out on some things as a kid, I actually was learning so many other things about people and life within these walls, being around people from the ages of 9 up till 90 years old, and everything in between.”
Since 1977, Paganis’s father, Vasili “Bill” Paganis, ran the salon himself after emigrating from Greece. But that changed when he fell and injured his head last November.
“When my father passed on Christmas, my mother asked me if I wanted the salon. She said, ‘Listen, I can’t run this from my kitchen table, but if you want it, I’ll give it to you. Dad would be thrilled.’ So, I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,’” she said. “Closing the doors to the shop would close my dad’s book, in a way, which made my family kind of sick to their stomach.”
She said thoughts of her community of family and friends, “clients who are also now friends and like family,” and the hairstylists who would lose their jobs motivated her to take on ownership of the salon.
While Paganis didn’t initially take to styling hair, her upbringing in the salon led to a decadeslong career in the field; first, however, she spent years in an adjacent field, starting when she was just 13.
“I went to St. Mary’s from fifth through eighth grade, so I would come here with my Catholic school uniform on and go to work. I walked here from school one day, and my mother, who had a huge clientele with nails, said, ‘I’ve been double-booked out every hour. Go wash your hands and come sit down. Today, I’m going to teach you how to prep for acrylics.’ I started learning that day, and by the time I was 14, I started building a clientele,” she said. “I was doing girls’ nails for dances, then their moms started coming to me, and I just took to it like a fish to water.”
For another decade, she worked as a nail technician before going to beauty school and returning to her father’s salon to transition into hairstyling.
“When I knew I wanted to be a hairstylist, but I didn’t know it before then, was when one of my dad’s employees, Heather, asked me to put on her root touchup. I said, ‘I don’t know how to do that,’ and she said, ‘Oh my gosh, you’ve seen it a million times. Come on, you can do it. I’ll walk you through it.’ I put that brush to the hair, and something came over me, honestly,” she said.
Paganis worked at Salon Elia under her father until her early 40s, when she left to work at Solo Salon in the West Loop for about 10 years before returning to work in Riverside.
“I just really loved being back in my dad’s shop and knowing everybody and feeling that sense of community. Although I came from this absolutely gorgeous, very progressive environment, now in my life, I was looking for a bit of a hug during my day,” she said. “When my mother and I talked about [taking on the salon], it felt perfect. It felt like, what I was searching for the last year and a half, my father gifted me from the other side through my mom.”
Paganis said she plans to keep Salon Elia running and growing to honor her father’s legacy. So far, she’s added more greenery to the waiting room and brought in a new line of products by R+CO for customers.
“My father had over 500 people come to his wake. A lot of friends, a lot of clients, and I can’t tell you the number of people who were crying and sharing how my father impacted their life in a positive way,” she said. “I care about people as much as he does, and so do the rest of us. It’s a big deal. We don’t take it lightly.”
