Hairstories

Getting down to the roots and history of indie haircuts

By Erin Kobayashi

My younger sister and I grew up wearing traditional feminine hairstyles: long, bone-straight hair with a fringe. When we went to high school, my sister’s hair evolved every month: long, short, black, blonde, blue, green, fashion mullet, soft baby doll curls. She thought about getting dreads (I was ardently against it). She even talked about the benefits of a perm (are there any?).

I, on the other hand, was always the traditionalist. I’ve had long hair most of my child and adult life with a few short-lived bobs and one boy cut that I immediately regretted. Perhaps I have been hiding behind my hair all of these years or worse, I am a conformist. Not exactly the image that I want to project.

Hair reflects more about us than we think it does. It is one of the first things people notice about each other. No wonder we spend time and money to obtain a specific look and talk about our hair issues with one another on a daily basis. Think about how the expressions, “good hair day” and “bad hair day” have entered our lexicon and can actually affect our selfesteem for a few hours. As superficial as it may seem, hair is an immediate signal that conveys distinct messages about who we are, where we come from and what we want.

“It’s a signifier that informs people what you think of the world and your place in it,” says Darren O’Donnell of Mammalian Diving Reflex who runs the social project, Haircuts by Children. “It’s a direct and succinct way to let everybody know what’s going on–to a very limited degree–inside your head. It’s the first thing other people judge you on.”

Haircuts by Children inadvertently addresses politics. By handing scissors over to children, who will cut the hair of volunteers, it gives youngsters a chance to empower themselves in an adult world. The project shows that something as trivial as a haircut can be empowering.

“Kids have few rights, they’re not really people in the political sense,” says O’Donnell, “They can’t vote, they always have to do what they’re told, the school system is incredibly coercive and stifling. Kids can do much more, they should be included in many of the decisions that affect them: curriculum design, neighbourhood design, building design.”

I begin to think about how different haircuts have empowered people and what the most revolutionary styles have been within the last 100 years in North America. And if the crew cut represents the army, what hairstyle represents the indie community? Are there hairstyles for men and women that reflect a non-mainstream position? A type of hairstyle that acts like a secret handshake between indie-minded people?

I think of the most popular haircuts I see at shows for indie bands and always come across the classic shag for men.

“Oh God, it looks like my son’s haircut,” says Steve Zdatny when he views the shag. Although the shag has lost it’s meaning and has now become a mainstream style, it wasn’t always common. In fact, it was once considered controversial.

Zdatny, an associate professor at West Virginia University who has written extensively about hair and fashion, says that before The Beatles came over, modern, long styles were a rarity in North America. “I’m old enough to remember that at that time, people had the same reaction to The Beatles haircuts as they did to rock and roll,” says Zdatny, “It was the end of civilization. The end of sexes. Girls were going to look like boys and there goes the American family.”

For women, I immediately think of short hair, especially pixie cuts, as a giveaway that they are part of the indie scene. Not surprising, considering that most indie-cultured people are liberal minded and incredibly comfortable with rolereversals between men and women. As I write this, Broken Pencil’s Editor, Lindsay Gibb, is sporting a pixie.

I offer the pixie cut to Zdatny as the ultimate non-mainstream cut of the last 100 years but he dismisses its relevance. “As statements go, it is more of a fashion statement than any kind of political statement,” he says of the short cut. “If you cut your hair now like Winona Ryder or Sinead O’Conner, it doesn’t have the same kind of historical importance. It’s trendy, fashionable, it looks good, and is gone in six months.”

Zdatny thinks the most important and revolutionary haircut within the 20th century for women has been the bob, even if we don’t look twice at it nowadays. “The bob is different because in the 1920s, short hair on women was really unprecedented,” he explains, “It was a real attack on what the majority of culture considered to be femininity. Some kinds of bobs were more aggressive on their attack than others. But one way or another, the bob is a big thing.”

Although the bob currently represents an understated elegance, back in the 1920s, it showed that young women had the economic means to go to the beauty parlour and cut their hair. “It’s not just a haircut but a statement of emancipation,” he says.

Inspired, I ask my co-worker if I should bob my hair even though I’m comfortable with the way it looks right now. “I usually don’t care about giving advice to women about their hair,” he says, “but your hair is fine the way it is.”

And even though my long hair doesn’t scream anti-establishment like a Mohawk or freedom like a natural fro, it does reflect an avant-garde idea: hair peace, as Yoko Ono might say. A statement I’m happy to make.

Hairy Facts

And you thought your middle school had strict rules about how to wear your hair? In 2005, a North Korea state-owned television station launched a series called, “Let us trim our hair in accordance with socialist lifestyle.” The campaign urged countrymen to wear their hair short and cut it every 15 days. The propaganda looked at the “negative affects” of long hair and claimed that long hair “consumes a great deal of nutrition” with the potential to rob the brain of energy.

In Rose Weitz’s book, Rapunzel’s Daughters, the author writes about black women slaves with straighter hair being coveted as sexual prizes by plantation owners and threatening white women: “Plantation records testify to the importance attached to black women’s hair: In virtually every recorded incident in which a slave was punished by having his or her head shaved, the punished slave was a woman with straight hair and the person who ordered it was a white woman. By doing so, white women could reduce the threat these slaves posed to their marriages while punishing both the slaves and the white men who found them attractive.”

No sorority sister love here: When Keri Russell of the television show Felicity cut her trademark curly hair short, ratings declined and viewers wrote angry letters to the network. In a response, producers of the show required all of the female members of the cast to keep their hair long.