Beauty by Numbers Jean Seberg filming Breathless in 1959
10: Number of minutes Amelia Earhart flew (as a passenger) at a Long Beach, California, air show in 1920. Afterward, she cropped her hair in the style of other female aviators and started taking flying lessons. 1925: Year American performer Josephine Baker made her stage debut in Paris. The audience loved her—and her short hair. 1,000: Approximate number of bobs salons in major cities gave during peak weeks in 1926 and 1927. Many offered smelling salts to women who fainted midcut. 1940: Year Frida Kahlo painted Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair soon after divorcing her husband, Diego Rivera. In it, Kahlo is surrounded by hair scattered on the floor. 1: Year later Kahlo and Rivera reconciled. 1944: Year women who’d had sex with occupying Nazi soldiers had their heads shaved publicly in front of jeering crowds. This has been referred to as “the ugly carnival.” 1966: Year Mia Farrow cut her hair short using a pair of fingernail scissors. 1: Inches Vidal Sassoon, often erroneously credited with giving Farrow her first short cut, trimmed her hair as a publicity stunt for the movie Rosemary’s Baby. 47: Years later Farrow wrote to The New York Times with two corrections to an article on famous haircuts: “I intend no disrespect to Mr. Sassoon, but he had nothing to do with my haircut. Neither, I can assure you, did my divorce from Frank Sinatra.”
When a woman gets a drastic haircut, it can be a sign of strength, a cry for help—or just the desire for a fresh look. Here, the short history. —KATE SULLIVAN
1100 B.C.: Approximate year Greeks began burying their dead in the ground; widows would cut their hair and bury it with their husbands. 13: Joan of Arc’s approximate age when, in the fifteenth century, she cut her hair into a style popular among knights, similar to a pageboy. 4: Centuries later that Parisian hairstylist Monsieur Antoine gave his clients what he called a “bob,” saying it was inspired by Saint Joan. I: World War during which American women began cutting their hair into bobs. Many historians attribute the trend to military nurses adopting shorter cuts for convenience and hygiene. 1920s: Decade many American schools and churches rallied against flappers for “acting like men.” To discourage girls from bobbing their hair, some pamphlets claimed it would cause a girl to grow a mustache. 22 Allure • August 2015
1: Approximate number of weeks before the 1989 Milan fashion shows that photographer Peter Lindbergh convinced model Linda Evangelista to cut her hair short. 16: Number of designers (out of 20) who subsequently canceled Evangelista’s appearance in their runway shows. Soon after, however, the cut ignited her career. 72: Percentage of British men who found women with long hair the most attractive in a 2013 survey about dating. Fifteen percent preferred short hair, and 13 percent didn’t care either way. 15: Number of the 23 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who had a bob in 2014.
1980S
Decade singer Annie Lennox said, “There’s something very sensual about running your fingers through short hair.”
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1988: Year the film Working Girl was released. In it, Melanie Griffith played an ambitious Staten Island secretary who chops her hair to chin length, saying, “You wanna be taken seriously, you need serious hair.”
