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founders Arnaud Plas Catherine Taurin Nicolas Mussat Paul Michaux
creative director Rashi Birla
editorial director contributors
Amanda Flores
acting editorial director
Cover Molly Matalon
Fiorella Valdesolo
Words Aria Aber Marjon Carlos Rachel Fleit Laura McLaws Helms Archana Ram Vishaka Robinson Arabelle Sicardi Laura Silverman Rachel Syme
Hazel Castillo
Art IringĂł Demeter Ryan Duffin Alexis Eke Stefani Pappas Kat Slootsky Heather Sten Barrett Sweger Matt Walker
senior designer designer Ana MarĂa Dorta-Duque
photo editor Morgan Young
editorial assistant Emily Bowen
A letter from the Editor
Hair’s entanglement with power is longstanding. Take the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah: Samson claims his seven braids are key to his formidable strength, a fact Delilah exploits, having it cut off, then handing him over to the Philistines. For certain Native American tribes hair is revered as a physical expression of the spirit; so exalted that a lock is often buried with the deceased. And consider the weight of the afro: at the heyday of the ‘60s Black Power movement, it was more than just a striking beauty statement; it was a political declaration. Even the small screen has bore witness to hair’s power: remember when Keri Russell’s character Felicity decided to chop her signature long curls into a pixie? The public reaction—shock; ire; even threats of bodily harm—and the accompanying ratings deep dive has since become both a punchline and the stuff of small screen beauty legend. The absence of hair—specifically, the decision to shave it off—can be just as powerful. When Britney Spears famously (and thanks to overzealous paparazzi, publicly) took clippers to her head, tabloids said she had lost control, but, perhaps, she was reclaiming it: she was heard saying, “I’m tired of everyone touching me.” Same goes for Sinead O’Connor whose decision to go bald was a rejection of industry executives’ attempts to sexualize her, and Grace Jones, who claims her empowerment came by breaking the rules about how she was meant to look. In considering a theme for this, the second issue of At Length, we looked to the magazine’s founding credo: to explore topics at the intersection of hair and culture. As we find ourselves in a time when power—who is wielding too much of it and, more frequently, who feels powerless—has become a regular part of the collective conversation, the word felt like a fitting driving force for this edition. You’ll find nuanced deliberations on shifting hair ideals; reflections on hair’s greater cultural impact; and deeply personal accounts of how hair has shaped and shifted our identities. All of it a testament to hair’s power.
fiorella valdesolo
Power Tool: The
HAIRDRYER The history of one of the most common household appliances is more than just hot air. Hairdryer as objet d’art? At the Cooper Hewitt museum you’ll find a trio of 1970 Braun AG blow-dryers crafted from molded plastic in bright yellow, red and blue.
In 2015 Antoine Terrieux, a French magician, juggler and artist, transformed hairdryers into art, arranging a number of them in a kinetic installation to create a spinning vortex of air.
In 2010, blow-drying took center stage with the launch of Drybar, where the concept is simple: no cuts, no color, just blowouts.
Photography by Imagno/Getty Images
According to a recent survey by Mintel, 75.5% of women and 24.5% of men in the U.S. regularly use a hairdryer.
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Big Screen Blow Drying:
British billionaire engineer Sir James Dyson, the same man who elevated the lowly vacuum cleaner to cult design item is also behind the most forward-thinking— and, at $399, expensive—hairdryer.
In 1888, French hairstylist Alexander F. Godefroy, invented the earliest precursor to the modern hairdryer: a stationary, unwieldy, contraption. New Yorker food writer Helen Rosner’s secret to perfectly crispy roast chicken? A session with her blow-dryer (it’s a Dyson).
The first patent for a hand-held hairdryer was granted to Gabriel Kazanjian in 1911.
Before the home hairdryer became ubiquitous, vacuum cleaner brands advised fashioning a hose to the exhaust to get the job done. Seriously. The LA Times obituary for Vidal Sassoon said his most enduring contribution was his simplest: he popularized the handheld blowdryer.
Most iconic hairdryer spokesmodel? Farrah Fawcett for the 1970s-era Schick Styler. The ideal tool for creating her signature feathered flip.
Film’s Top 5 Hairdryer Moments 1 Saturday Night Fever Blowdrying was a key element of John “Watch the hair!” Travolta’s pre-disco gettingready ritual.
2 Thelma and Louise The most ruthless outlaws practice their stick-up skills with a hairdryer like Brad Pitt, right?
3 Shampoo Warren Beatty’s Beverly Hills hairdresser has been referred to, and rightfully so, as “Don Juan with a blow-dryer.”
4 Spaceballs Princess Vespa’s industrialstrength (and industrial-sized) version is the hairdryer’s most hilarious on-screen cameo.
5 Back to the Future Doc opens up Marty’s 1985 suitcase to find a hairdryer. “A hairdryer? Don’t they have towels in the future?”
Power Tool: The Hairdryer
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Grey
Area Photography by Heather Sten
By letting her hair go grey, Laura Silverman gained a new kind of control. I’ll never forget the day in 2001 when my then-mother-in-law registered disgust at a New York Times Magazine cover featuring the actress Liv Ullmann: “Ugh, she’s really let herself go.” Never mind that Ullmann was in New York to meet with members of the Women’s Commission, an organization she co-founded to support women and child refugees, and to do publicity for Faithless, the fourth feature film she had directed. What mattered to my mother-in-law (who remained blonde until the day she died) was that this iconic face, undeniably beautiful at age 62, had aged visibly, softening and accruing lines that mapped her experience. In the years that followed, I chewed over this idea of letting oneself go and what that meant. Although I knew it was a phrase full of negative connotations levelled primarily at women— she’s gained weight! she’s not coloring her hair! she’s so wrinkled!—lurking within there seemed to be an opposing but clear message of empowerment. After all, what could be more liberating than just letting go? Years later, when I left my longtime home in Manhattan to live in a Catskills cabin, I let go of a lot. My loft on the Bowery. The convenience of take-out.
My personal trainer. And a standing appointment to get my hair colored every three weeks. My decision at age 47 to let my hair go grey was driven by a deeply personal mix of curiosity, expediency, and defiance. I had been dyeing my hair for so long that I really had no idea what lay beneath my artificially maintained “natural” color (brown). My day trips to the city, though still frequent, were packed with client meetings and seeing friends, so sitting in the salon for three hours was utterly impractical. Living in close proximity to nature had begun to work its magic on me and I felt an increasing desire to reveal my authentic self, regardless of the cultural norm. I wanted to let myself go. To me, this did not mean giving up. But it did require releasing myself from certain standards to which I had grown accustomed after working for so many years in the fashion industry. As my roots began to show my actual hair color (grey), friends marveled at my “courage.” Some warned me I should be prepared to lose clients. Still others, my husband among them, supported me by acting like it wasn’t a big deal at all. It took months and months for the dye to grow out fully, so I began wearing my shoulder-length hair in a French twist. It was all silver in the front—and who knows what from the back; I tried not to look. In the meantime, I took care of myself as I always have: eating well, exercising, getting regular facials and spending time in the woods. I did not let go of my health and beauty practices—nor my vanity, sadly.
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Suddenly, it seems, it’s hip to be grey. 10 At Length At Length
Once my hair was fully grown out, I received more compliments on it than I ever had before. I continue to work for a wide range of clients. I’ve even accepted some modeling offers. People now tell me they wish they could stop coloring their hair, but they know it wouldn’t look as good as mine. They have the wrong color grey. It wouldn’t flatter their complexions. Men will no longer find them attractive. Turns out, that’s all a bunch of hooey. Just ask Simone Silverman, who founded an online platform, The Silver Women, after becoming frustrated by the media’s failure to fully represent the rich diversity of older women. Despite having just turned 50 and allowing her own long tresses to turn grey, Simone says she has never felt “invisible.” Granted, she is a former model, but she attributes this mostly to “how you carry yourself and what you’re projecting.” Though The Silver Women is not limited to those who have gone grey—“I’m an advocate for women doing whatever the hell they want,” laughs Simone—many of the over-40 subjects featured on the site have stopped coloring their hair, including Jocelyn Beaudoin, 61, a longtime prop stylist who launched a thriving modeling career when she walked the runway for Rachel Comey. An article on Vogue.com said “her silver-wheat curls looked radically fresh.” Top models sporting variations on grey, salt-&-pepper and silver now include Kristen McMenamy, Stella Tennant and Erin O’Connor. Older models like Yazemeenah Rossi, Carmen Dell’Orefice and Maye Musk (yes, Ilan’s mom) are working more than ever for clients from Target and Sweaty Betty, to Sephora and Rolex. Suddenly, it seems, it’s hip to be grey. L’Oréal named smoky grey hair among its top color trends this year and we’ve all seen this unlikely shade on young women. I was relieved to hear from a 27-year-old acquaintance that her grey phase had not been ironic. “It’s a beautiful color!” she cried. “I really love the luminous quality you get.” That can require a bit of maintenance, as grey is often coarser and may acquire a yellow cast from product build-up and pollution. One solution is available at Takamichi Hair, a downtown New York City salon, where Creative Director Takamichi Saeki advocates a fast-acting, brush-on treatment known as bokashi to minimize warm undertones and enhance cool ones. “Many of my clients in the last few years have decided to keep their same style but go grey,” he says. “We sometimes add a few highlights or use color blending to keep them looking modern and super-chic.” I like to think that’s how I look, and will continue to look, as I age with grey hair, wrinkles, and whatever else is coming. For me, growing older has certainly been about letting go—of shame, of fear, of conformity—but one thing I will never relinquish is a sense of myself as a vital, sensual, stylish woman. One who is always looking toward the future.
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Our Hair, Ourselves Sometimes it’s not the specific hairstyle, but the fact that it’s specifically yours, that imbues it with a particular strength. Having a signature look, no matter what it might be, is its own power move. Photography by Ryan Duffin
Change your hair, change your life, the old beauty adage goes. And there is, of course, a force unmistakable that comes with lopping off a foot of hair or cutting dramatic micro-bangs, dyeing it a pearlescent turquoise or just shaving it all off. But, it could be conjectured, that finding a signature and sticking to it—thereby resisting the pull of trends, the persuasive power of stylists, the tendency of intense life events to spur decisions of a drastic nature—is its own
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force. And the examples of those who have found strength in having a signature look are many: consider Gwen Stefani without her platinum blonde; Cher with short hair, or, alternately, Jamie Lee Curtis with long; or iconic fashion magazine doyenne Anna Wintour sans the sharp, blunt bob that she’s been wearing for decades. They are the hairstyles with staying power and while their impact may be different, it’s no less significant.
Haroon
signature style: locs with high top fade “People in my immediate community see my hair and think I’m being rebellious, or that me growing my locs is a phase I’ll grow out of but I disagree. This was a journey and the longer my hair got, the more my self-confidence grew, so I really don’t care what others
My hair is... my armor
think. I get a lot of messages from other Somali boys who want to grow their hair out but fear judgement or have to convince their parents, but at the end of the day it’s your hair and you should be able to do what you want with it. My locs are part of who I am now.”
Ro
signature style: no fuss “My style is focused a lot on comfort and flexibility. It’s always about balance and counterbalance for me: having more polished crisp elements with rougher edges. Those kinds of contradictions and inversions interest me. Time plays a big role in why I have short hair; it’s so easy to just wet it and change it us-
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ing my hands. I want my hair to appear as neutral as possible. I like to be able to slip in and out of different spaces without leaving a trace, to be able to approach any given person and not have them have preconceived notions. I don’t want my style to ever enter the room before I do.”
Thomas
signature style: long and fluffy with plenty of waves “I’ve always been really proud of my hair color and the length helps me celebrate that difference. I get ‘ma’amed a lot in public though. The fact that my hair is longer than most guys definitely contributes to those reactions. I kind of like that it keeps my gender a bit ambiguous; whenever someone mistakes
me for a girl I just prefer to assume it’s because I’m looking extra pretty that day. I think that anything that makes you look different is such an asset, especially living in New York. There are millions of people... how are you going to stand out?”
My hair is... my blanket Our Hair, Ourselves
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Chavi
signature style: big, round, brushed-out Afro “My signature style was actually an accident. I used to straighten my hair but then one morning I didn’t have time to do it so I just left it natural and brushed it out, and since then it’s become my thing. People are always commenting “fro goals” on my Instagram. When it comes to natural hair everyone is obsessed with their copattern and the products that define their curls and that whole thing, but you don’t have to be stuck to that same route to love your natural hair. And I love that my style makes me look more like my mom: she was born in the 1950s so she was my age now in the 1970s and when I see photos we look the same. Obviously with my Afro I do look like women from the 1970s like Kathleen Cleaver or Angela Davis or women who were in the Black Panther party so it is a political act and it’s making a statement, but it’s also just my simple reality: how my hair looks when I brush it out.”
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[:] Written on the Body TK [dek:] TK 2/8
My hair is... my vibe Article Name
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Lost and
It took Rachel Fleit many years, and just as many wigs, to make peace with being bald. When I was 1 ½-years-old, I lost all of my hair. All of it; even my tiny eyelashes and eyebrows disappeared. My parents, both immunologists, thought it was the thing when the baby’s hair falls out, cradle cap or something? My grandmother said “I read something about this in Reader’s Digest… you should take her to the doctor…” The dermatologist would confirm my grandmother’s hypothesis. “Your daughter will never grow hair, she has alopecia universalis… otherwise she is a very healthy little girl,” he told my parents. They were scared. I think my mother even used the word devastated years later in describing the day they got the news. It’s a word I would return to in my twenties when I spent most of my paycheck, crying about the implications of being a bald girl while stretched out on my analyst’s couch on the Upper West Side. Everyone around me was scared for me. That fear would become a theme. In the mid-1980s, I went from being a confident, self-possessed, stylish, tiny bald girl in striped shorts, white tights, neon pink socks and splatter paint sneakers to a 4 ½-year-old en route to my first day of kindergarten in a synthetic wig with feathered bangs far too big for my head. They said something about getting a wig for school, something about the wig being a tool to help me better adjust, because kids were cruel. All of my confidence drained out of me on that crisp September day, when a little boy, who remains faceless in my memory, asked me, “is your hair a wig?’ I quickly replied, “no.”
Found Photography by Heather Sten
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I lied. I lied because somewhere in there, I got scared too about who I was. I don’t know how it happened, but the fear seeped in. Maybe it was the fear of my family and their fierce desire to protect me from any harm whatsoever. Or maybe it was the physical symbol of the wig being placed on my head—I got the subliminal message that there was something to hide. What I know is that after that day, every single action I took was motivated by fear. The switch was flipped. When I told that boy I wasn’t wearing a wig, it was the beginning of a 14 year mental obsession. I had to, under all circumstances, keep the secret. The fear was that if the kids at school knew I was bald under that wig, they wouldn’t want to be my friend. If they knew I wore a wig, they wouldn’t want to be around me because they would think they could catch the alopecia and their hair would fall out too. At 4 ½ I decided I was a pariah. And when I let that thought really sink in, at 38, it sends a shiver down my spine. Underneath it all, my fear was that if you knew who I really was, you would reject me.
And so I wore a wig; a different wig, every year, for 14 years. A mullet, a bowl cut, a blunt cut with bangs, a perm, another perm and a better perm. In the early 1990s, I did big bangs with a curling iron and Rave hair spray. I went from synthetic to hand-sewn human hair. I cut thick pieces of adhesive tape, lined the inside and stuck that wig tight to my head. I put goggles on in the ocean so my wig wouldn’t fall off. I played soccer in a wig in the hot heat of August, sweat pouring out the sides. A good thick wig kept me afloat on the river of denial. I could put my wig on in the morning and forget about my bald head all day. Squint your eyes, stay in the fantasy, don’t look in the mirror, all is well. I wore my wig until it was tattered and thinning because I hated getting a new wig. That meant going to see Valerie on Route 111 in Smithtown at Advanced Hair Creations. Don’t get me wrong, Valerie was lovely. She had big permed hair and smoked cigarettes and she loved me. She was one of very few people who saw me without a wig on my head from 1985 to 1998 who was not a member of my immediate family. But when I went to Valerie, I had to confront my alopecia. Would the difference in the appearance of my new wig cause some suspicion at school? Would the kids notice? Would they discover the truth about me? I was obsessed, I told you.
And so I wore a wig; a different wig, every year, for 14 years. A mullet, a bowl cut, In high school, I finally found friends chorus class and the drama club. a blunt cut with bangs, inFriends that felt like outliers like me. My tribe. We stayed up late and built a perm, another perm and a better perm. 20
sets for plays and went to the diner and ate chicken fingers and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and sang songs from Rent. “La Vie Boheme.” I felt a part of something. Friends came out. And I came out too in a way and told them I was bald. I showed them my head. They said, Don’t ever put that thing back on your head. They said, You’re beautiful, just the way you are. I had never heard that before. It was revelatory: you are perfect as you are. I wanted so badly to find the courage to take my wig off and not put it back on, I wanted so badly to believe them. I tried for two years to find the courage to do it. All I had to do was just remove the wig from my head. But I couldn’t. I learned later in life that sometimes you can have a case of the I have to’s, but I can’ts. It’s called powerlessness, and it’s a thing. So I prayed. Even though I didn’t even know I was praying, I prayed. And then
one day, the pain of not being who I really was in the world became greater than my fear of what people would think of me; the pain became greater than my fear of being rejected for being a girl without hair, and I took that fucking wig off my head. I packed the wig in my suitcase just in case I needed it. That was 20 years ago this past August. I wore a lime green bandana on my bald head and I walked into sophomore year at Ithaca College without my wig. It was scary and I did it; I walked right through the fear. What happened on the other side was the opposite of what I thought it would be. On the other side of the fear was a warm embrace, from everyone, everywhere I went. It was like a warm bath. I had arrived in the land of to thine own self be true and I quickly learned that once you get through the fear, truth is a beautiful place to be. I had this fantasy though, when I took off the wig, everything would change, all those other feelings would disappear too. That wasn’t the case. The wig was like a layer of the proverbial onion. Have you heard about the onion? It really works as a metaphor because self-acceptance, in my experience, it’s layered. For me, the wig was the hardest and thickest of the layers, a tough skin that I finally wrenched off of my head, revealing quite literally, a shiny pearly white smooth skin underneath. It felt brilliant. But beneath that initial layer, were many more: layers of fear, old ideas, self-hatred, blame, sadness, grief, guilt, and shame too.
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Nowadays, I have learned how to use the fear instead of shy away from it. Walk through it, live my scary life. The fear is my ammunition. And when I am scared about something, I remind myself: You were a 4-year-old in a wig in kindergarten—it was scary and punk rock and you made it out alive. You have withstood so much pain and humiliation and heartbreak, you took off that wig, you walk around as a bald woman in a world that values hair so damn much, you can do this, you can do anything. My experience as a bald person is always my reference point, whether I am consciously aware of it or not, it is my power and it propels me through everything.
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There are many parts to a person, but alopecia is on the outside so it takes up so much real estate in the identity conversation; it’s impossible for it not to. Being a bald woman has given me an uncanny intuition, the ability to experience profound empathy, a capacity to discover and celebrate what’s unique about a person, a sensitivity and awareness of others that I carry with me in every single interaction. To be the bald kid, to be the bald girl in the wig, to be the bald girl who took off the wig, to be the bald woman—it has allowed me to be seen in a way that I wouldn’t if I was covered in hair. It is vulnerable and scary and beautiful and unique; it is my true power and it is my greatest gift.
And then one day, the pain of not being who I really was in the world became greater than my fear of what people would think of me; the pain became greater than my fear of being rejected for being a girl without hair,
and I took that fucking wig off my head. Article Name
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Written on the Body In 1915, a time of rapidly evolving mores and, in turn, less conservative fashions, Gillette released the Milady Decollette, the first modern razor for women. The brand would use the accompanying advertisements as an opportunity to shame women into shaving their newly exposed (thanks to the dawn of sleeveless dresses) underarms. “A beautiful addition that solves an embarrassing personal problem‌ now that a feature of good dressing and good
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grooming is to keep underarms white and smooth.� A century later underarm hair on women is still considered, by many, to be subversive; a choice that falls outside the more widely acceptable norm. But no matter what your gender identity, the body hair you choose to keep, and what you choose to remove can serve, much like the hair (or lack of it) on our heads, as both a statement and a defining feature of our style and character.
Photography by Iringรณ Demeter
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g n i n Crow Glory In 1990, Audre Lorde wrote
an essay asking,
Nearly thirty “is your hair still political?� ds that when fin years later, Marjon Carlos d their hair, it comes to black women an . there is still a lot to untangle
Art by Alexis Eke
In early August of this year, the supermodel Naomi Campbell posted a meme on Instagram of a little black girl with Botticelli-esque waves. Like “The Birth of Venus” herself, the toddler sat innocent and demure, her chin held high, jet black strands flowing down her back. Though she hadn’t burst forth from a giant scallop shell, the little girl in question was, indeed, a surreal thing of beauty and proportions: her small dome barely able to handle the weight of her hair. A moment later, a hand swoops in from off-screen and gently tugs at her mane, revealing it was a wig all along. The child becomes hysterical. Her natural hair underneath (to the trained eye, a 4c grade of curls) is twisted up into age-appropriate bantu knots—a common protective style for black tresses—but the child is not OK with this reveal. Tears flow and, mouth open, she releases an inaudible wail. All of her previous composure is lost. Without missing a beat, the hand moves back into frame and places the wig back on her head; the tears dry up. Preening her mane with her teeny hands, the child sits up straight and looks off into the distance, as if posing for an editorial shoot. She’s in her own world, a fairytale of her own making— she’s Rapunzel! Elsa! Naomi’s caption reads, “GIVE IT BACK!”, punctuated by an emoji crying tears of joy. You could interpret the post as just the supermodel’s brand of humor— dead, flat, shady—and the child’s reaction normal, after having a favorite
“toy” taken away. Campbell has worn wigs her entire career—perhaps she saw herself in the girl? But, for many black women, whose hair has become a minefield of insecurities, triggers, and identity complexes, the clip felt more loaded than that. There was a subtext to the joy Campbell and her followers gleaned from a young black girl confronting her own image and not liking what she saw. Who could blame her? After all, for centuries Western societal mores and beauty standards have punished, penalized, and undermined black women’s hair, deeming it wild, unkempt, and in some instances when worn in its free state, punishable by law. Take the Tignon Laws of antebellum New Orleans for example: rulings came down from the Spanish governor declaring that both free and enslaved women of African descent were prohibited from showing their hair in public. The intricate hair designs they donned had been catching the attention of white men, much to the horror of local society. As a way to restore order, avoid the risk of miscegenation, and in turn, reinforce their slave status, free black women were forced to wrap their locks in “tignons,” or handkerchiefs. This in no way curtailed these women from showcasing their style or beauty, however: sticking feathers and other adornments on their wraps and choosing electric shades of fabric, black women found a way to freely express themselves, even in the face of humiliation.
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Still, the stigma remained. For generations to follow, black women would go to incredible lengths to hide or considerably alter the texture of our hair in an attempt to assuage society’s nerves and to capitulate to a particular beauty ideal that espoused that finer, less kinky hair was the paradigm. Like the little girl in the video, it was understood that long, flowing locks—like that of a white woman—were what we should hope to embody, although it was rare that many black women naturally did. We internalized this inability as a deficit; an inherent lacking in femininity, beauty, poise; and in so many ways, humanity. Whether it was our grade of hair, skin color, or facial features, against the dominant white standards that much of society operated under, it would seem that black women could never measure up… and so we would work tirelessly to improve ourselves. No hair out of place would be tolerated. As Maya Angelou said in the 2009 documentary, Good Hair, “Hair is a woman’s glory and you share that glory with your family.” From “pressing”
It was a mindset passed down from generation to generation, from our great grandmothers and on, that our hair was to be maintained and prioritized.
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one’s hair with a hot comb, to permanent relaxers, Jheri curls, weaves, and wigs, we coaxed, prodded, and subdued our locks into submission on a quest for “good hair.” Standing Saturday morning hair appointments at the salon were de rigueur for most black women, the salon becoming a restorative hub and a sacred place of trust where black women were finally able to let their hair down, so to speak; hairstylists became something akin to family and therapists, knowing just how your curl pattern operated and exactly how you wanted to be seen. The Black Is Beautiful movement of the 1960s and 1970s would directly challenge these traditions. Taking its cues from the rallying call of abolition-
ist Rock John, who, in an 1857 speech declared, “Black is beautiful,” the upliftment movement was a response to the historical denigration of black beauty and served as a celebration of our natural features. Photographer Kwame Braithwaite would document the halcyon days of this cultural shift, capturing the varying skin tones and coiffures of the movement’s followers, women who had shorn their chemically processed hair and were now boasting leaping Afros. My mother followed the movement, growing her curls out as a college student in Mississippi in the 1970s, much to the dismay of my grandmother. As family lore has it, when my mother arrived home from school break and attempted to wear her hair “natural” to church, my grandmother protested. No one had ever deigned to wear their hair out to Sunday service before and my mother wouldn’t be the one to lead that charge. It was my great-grandmother who came to my mother’s defense, though, telling my grandmother, “Let that girl wear her hair the way she wants!” And so it was. The Black Is Beautiful movement would run prologue to the current natural hair movement of today, a boon in the beauty market which over the last decade has seen black women across the world undergo “the big chop” and begin to openly embrace our curl patterns. It’s a powerful reckoning of a history that has always claimed that our hair should be concealed, hidden, and altered, and it has been an incredible assertion of black ownership within the beauty market. Black female entrepreneurs, from hairstylists to product inventors, have been able to capitalize on the billion-dollar black hair industry for the first time. Which is why, seeing conflicting messages like the video on Naomi Campbell’s Instagram page feels so counterproductive and harmful. It continues to reaffirm damaging and racist notions around our natural features. That this comes from one of the greatest black beauty icons is that much more damning: After all, Campbell’s battle with alopecia has been a very public one, and her black supermodel peers have lamented for years the trials of coming to a set and working with an untrained hairstylist who wreaks havoc on their tresses. Is it a “laugh so you don’t cry” scenario? Now, none of this is to say that I don’t play with my own. As a black woman, I relish in being a hair chameleon—changing my look as it suits my mood—and I believe it’s a black woman’s prerogative to manipulate her coils as she so pleases. Get the weave! Buy the wig! Butt length braids are fun! We’ve been vilified enough for years—either as self-loathing victims or by outside attempts to undermine our natural beauty—so I encourage black women to do with it what they will. But, keep in mind, we don’t have the benefit of not being intentional with our hair: every decision is purposeful. So it’s important that the messages we continue to disseminate reflect one that comes from a place of self-love. It’s about undoing the learned fallacies around our hair in order to help the next generation, just like my great-grandmother proved to my grandmother all those years ago.
Crowning Glory
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Perpetual Motion Photography by Stefani Pappas
Tossed and twirled, flipped and whipped, how we manipulate hair has its own special allure. As evidenced here, when a dancer’s hair is worn loose (the visual antithesis of the traditional taut ballerina bun), its movement becomes as integral as that of the body.
Perpetual Motion
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Words by Lorem ipsum dolor Illustrations by xxxx
Hair, Queer, and Everywhere Arabelle Sicardi charts the evolution of the mustache’s relationship to queer identity.
The first time I remember experiencing lesbian pangs of intimacy was when my elementary school friends had sleepovers where we ripped off each other’s hair. Legs and arms were pinned down to endure the temporary pain we considered necessary to be womanly, and unquestionably necessary to be loved. I went along with it because the thrill of holding someone else’s body made me flush, and caring for someone else’s body made me feel less neurotic about my own. It’s been more than a decade since those hair removal rituals, and my relationship to queer identity and body hair has gotten more considered and consensual. Summers have been spent shaving friend’s heads and dyeing hair, curling mustaches into perfect handlebars and taping on temporary ones. Rather than “fixing” each other’s natu-
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ral inclinations to maintain an appropriately desirable front, we ask each other what looks we’re in the mood to serve. Hair went from being the thing we needed to eliminate to feel wanted, to being just another aspect we could use to signal what we wanted to show the world. Historically, though, the dynamics of what you “needed” to “look” queer were as limiting and even more high stakes as the requirements to be heterosexually desireable. It was, and still is, a matter of acceptance or disaster. In the 1950s, butch/femme style was rigidly enforced. If a woman in a bar was not clearly butch (masculine, without makeup, hairy) or femme (made up, likely hairless), other lesbians would be afraid to approach her. This wasn’t about personal preferences—it was a realistic fear that she might be a
Photography by Mihajlo Ckovric/Stocksy
policewoman planted to arrest everyone. Stonewall was a riot started by a trans woman, Marsha P. Johnson: someone who adhered to certain standards of beauty, but also did not “pass” as a cis woman. She threw a brick during police raids, resulting from laws on cross-dressing targeted towards queer people. A woman with a mustache and Levi’s was essentially seen as breaking the law. Those laws have been repealed, but queer folks are still disproportionately targeted by acts of violence, and trans women specifically are killed nearly every day for daring to be who they are. Queer identity and facial hair are still intrinsically linked, because it is so deeply ingrained into cultural ideals regarding what gender we are. How we choose to carry ourselves puts us in the crosshairs of people who expect something from us. The aesthetics of queer identity are often still binary, and people outside those lines are both fetishized and hunted. A femme with a mustache is seen as unprofessional and suspect, and a queer man with a mustache is often seen as hypersexual. My friend Slater, a gender fluid makeup artist known for his porn-star mustache, recently shaved it off to pursue drag. He stopped being cruised as much and was catcalled by men who saw him as a cis woman; when he grew it back, he was fetishized. “I used to be so attached to my hair identity because it kept me safe, and it’s how people knew me. Hair holds a lot of spiritual energy.
I wanted to let go of being boxed into a certain group, and let go of certain traumas. A lot of that is stored in hair. The hair on my head and my face was a safeguard for how I’ve been desired.”
When I finally began to fully embrace my nonbinary identity in public, facial hair became a source of power for me. On the other side of the ‘stache spectrum is Grace, a non-binary femme growing theirs out. Doing so as a person often seen as a cis woman is a source of transgressive freedom. “I’ve always been a fat person, a hairy person. I never identified with my assigned gender at birth, and I was told that being pretty was something I wasn’t. When I finally began to fully embrace my nonbinary identity in public, facial hair became a source of power for me. I’ve stopped altering it. I feel so much more comfortable with myself.” Wherever you stand on the ‘stache, it has its roots (sorry) in comfort, in desire, in wanting to be seen and held for the person we are. Whether that means shaving it or using a little Glossier Boy Brow to enhance it (as Grace does) know that as a queer person you are in a family of people who are considering the same questions as you. You’ve got a whole history of queers behind you, who have gone on every step of your journey. You’ve got an army of love behind you. We rioted for your choice, after all.
Hair, Queer and Everywhere
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The Long and Short of It When it comes to our hair, are waist-grazing layers or a tightly cropped pixie more of a power move? Laura McLaws Helms and Vishaka Robinson consider the relationship between hair length and identity.
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Photography by Kat Slootsky Article Name
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Long Hair According to my family, the first complete thought I uttered aloud was “No cut!” accompanied by dramatic scissor hand motions around my head. Until then my mother had been having my hair trimmed into a short bowl cut— easy for her to take care of but the nadir of glamour for a small girl obsessed with Barbie and She-Ra’s flowing locks. I’d somehow latched on early to an understanding that long hair was a visual signifier of my true identity—as a romantic, a dreamer, a sensualist. I never cut my hair short again.
waves (replicated four decades later in illustrated glory by Jessica Rabbit). Rita Hayworth made movie history when she hair-flipped onto the screen in Gilda, while Alicia Silverstone’s Cher based her whole attraction method on hair flipping. Veiling an eye, tossing it around, running one’s fingers through it—much of the art of flirting we are fed requires long hair. These preconceptions are so ingrained that, at times, my long hair’s natural movements seems to be doing the flirting for me (regardless of whether that is my aim).
I did go part of the way once—upon graduating high school, I was convinced by my stylist to cut it to a few inches below my shoulders. Roundly admired by all of my parents’ friends for looking “so mature”—is there any compliment worse for a teenager flush in their youthful exuberance?—I promptly refused to trim my hair for two years following until it had reached its rightful place again: belly button length, covering my breasts, more than a little inspired by the wanton sensuality of a Blue Lagoon-era Brooke.
There’s another stereotype the media is wont to portray: the sulky girl who hides behind her long hair. And, for some, long hair does serve the purpose of being a shield of sorts. Yet, when I look back on my own life, I see an opposing pattern. When I’ve been the most desperately unhappy, I’ve taken to wearing my hair pulled back tightly in a bun. As if my long hair commands such energy that it’s completely out of alignment with a disconsolate mood. Recently, I came across an ad in a 1946 issue of Seventeen that read: “A girl’s hair is her fortune.” The implication being that long locks are synonymous with beauty and, therefore, something to aspire to, a prize worth trying to attain. But for me long hair’s capital is about confidence: it is a visual harbinger of my true essence. Empowerment in hair form.
What is it about long hair that captures our collective imagination? Why has almost every cinematic femme fatale had cascading tresses? And, nowadays, every Instagram famous model? Wherein lies its power? On screen, long hair operates as a seductive weapon. Veronica Lake tantalized cinemagoers when she peeked out from beneath her peekaboo
44 At Length
Short Hair There is no single more liberating beauty move than cutting your hair short. In fact, ask any stylist what their favorite task is and most will go mistyeyed at the thought of lopping off a lifetime of growth. The opportunity to expose those hidden-away napes of necks, and soft curves of a skull is just too irresistible. And when I say short I don’t mean a middling bob. I’m talking about Cara Delevingne-style buzz cuts; Megan Rapinoe-esque short back and sides; Charlize Theron’s above-the-ear bowl. Those short styles which skirt the line between in-your-face confidence and gamine coltishness; that say, I don’t care if you think I’m pretty… but look at me, because I know that I am. Before I went short, my hair was as wide as it was long; twisting in frazzled corkscrews around my head. It demanded a small arsenal of heat stylers and a laborious half hour of daily styling. It was big, big hair. But, after a ferocious peroxide spell, it started to break away in clumps at the root, like a dandelion being blown from its stalk. “This is all going to have to come off,” my stylist said with the knowing air of a surgeon giving fatal news. He proceeded to cut it terrifyingly short. I could barely grasp the tufts with my fingertips. I felt exposed and terrified— and hello, who knew my forehead was so vast?—but, I also instantly loved it. Suddenly I understood why the first thing Emma Watson did when she
was free of her Harry Potter contract (which stipulated she keep her hair long) was to opt for a dramatically short style. Why Mia Farrow took matters into her own hands when she fashioned her first crop in 1966 with a pair of nail scissors (yep, she got there before Vidal) and why Michelle Williams always keeps hers shorn above the ear (she once described her late husband Heath Ledger as the “one straight man who has ever liked short hair”). “Going short” is a shot of instant empowerment and singularity. And yes, maybe it’s the hair equivalent of a Teva or fanny pack—you know, something women adore but flummoxes men—but in a sea of long, barrel-curled hair it certainly gets you noticed. It also unleashes you from the utter drudgery of maintenance. I’ve switched my $300 balayage marathons for dinky packages of $5 root touch up from the drug store. Now, I change my color on a whim; copper, bleach, black and everything in-between because, who cares, it’ll grow out in two months. I’ve lost count of the number of people who say they’d love to go short, but lament that they couldn’t pull it off. I tell them this: if you’ve worn your hair in a slick bun and felt fabulous, you can pull off short hair. And, if you hate it, it’ll grow back. But be warned you’ll probably just want to cut it again: once you’ve tasted freedom, you don’t want to give it up.
The Long and Short of It
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MARCHING ORDERS
W HY ON E OF L I T E RATURE’S MOST ME MORA B L E H A I RC U TS STILL LOOM S L ARG E FOR W RI T E R R AC HEL SYM E. Art by Matt Walker
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On her thirtieth birthday, in 1862, Louisa May Alcott sat down in her room at Orchard House, her parent’s estate in Concord, Massachusetts, and wrote an entry in her diary about how she intended to become a nurse. The Civil War was raging, and while she had spent a year darning socks and sending care packages to Union soldiers, she wanted to do more. She was reaching for an experience beyond the walls of her childhood bedroom. For two years, she’d been writing about abolitionism and women’s rights for the Atlantic Monthly, but she had yet to see the world outside Concord. She yearned to get her hands dirty. Still, she did not know just how dirty it could get. Within a month of arriving at an army hospital in Washington D.C., she came down with typhoid fever and nearly died. At the time, the only known cure for typhoid was calomel powder, a “miracle drug” that researchers later found actually made people more ill due to mercury poisoning. (Alcott wrote about this in Hospital Sketches under the name of “Tribulation Periwinkle.”) She joined the war effort to heal the sick, and left instead with a mysterious sickness that would plague her all her life (scholars have claimed she also had lupus, or an autoimmune disease). She was often weak, and easily tired. And worse: she started to lose her hair. As far as we can tell from existing pictures, Alcott had a glorious head of hair throughout her youth. It was glossy and
chestnut brown, and she often pulled it back into an elegant arrangement of ribbons and braids. Sometimes, she would twist her plaits into a thick whorl at the nape of her neck, a playful hot-crossed bun. Sometimes she would showcase her natural wavy texture, leaving her chignon loose so that her hair rippled gently like a calm sea. Sometimes she let her sausage-shaped ringlets skim her shoulders. It might be said of Alcott, as she wrote of Josephine “Jo” March, the character in Little Women who was most like herself, that her hair was her “one beauty.” Like Jo, she had to cope with loss. Alcott, who died at 55, never went bald, but historians have argued that her hair thinned over time, possible after calomel treatments, and she suffered a blow to her self-esteem as a result. Still, like any artist who understands how to soothe their own pain by processing it through the work, she wrote her way through it. She wrote about Jo sacrificing her gorgeous mane, selling it to a wig-maker so that her mother can travel to see her ill husband. Jo cuts off a piece of herself for 25 dollars (a small fortune in the late 1800s) telling her sisters that it’s her “contribution towards making Father comfortable, and bringing him home.”
Still, like any artist who understands how to soothe their own pain by processing it through the work, she wrote her way through it.
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I have been thinking about this scene a great deal, as a new version of Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig, is set to hit theaters. When I first saw the 1994 adaptation—starring Winona Ryder as Jo in one of my favorite performances of all time—the scene, when Jo comes home with a short frizzy bob, made such an impression on me that I promptly told my mother that I, too, intended to sell my long locks to charity. I figured if Jo could part with her crowning glory for such a good cause, it would be a moral failure for me, an 11-year-old girl living in New Mexico over a century later, not to do the same. My mother, ever the pragmatist, did not allow it. She likely knew that as a blabbermouth with giant glasses heading into the thunderdome of middle school, I was already in peril, even with a shimmering head of tawny tresses (though in the end, my “one beauty” did not keep the bullies away).
I figured if Jo could part with her crowning glory for such a good cause, it would be a moral failure for me, an 11-year-old girl living in New Mexico over a century later, not to do the same. When I left home and was able to have agency in a salon chair, I experimented with shorter and shorter cuts for the next 20 years, growing my hair
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out to my collarbone only to lop it all off again. Every time (and I’ve had at least ten impulse bobs by now) it was the same emotional roller coaster: at first I was exhilarated, then I was whiny and regretful, and then, by week two, I made peace with my decision. I’d remember Jo, and how bravely she faced her plight, and how cutting off her hair was the thing that made her a writer more than anything else; how she had freed herself, physically and psychically, from the extra weight that was holding her back. I try to keep Alcott in mind whenever I get an itch to snip off my ponytail. I think about how she converted her insecurity into action, at first through an invented avatar, but also through the sustained act of creating a story larger than herself, so indelible that we are still telling it. For so many women, hair is linked to how we feel about ourselves, how we move through the world. When we have a good hair day, we feel invincible. Yet, with that one line about “one beauty,” Alcott smashed through these constraints. Of course Jo’s hair was not her one beauty—she composed beautiful sentences, she had a beautiful relationship with her family, she had a beautiful confidence that pushed all of her sisters to grow and explore. Hair was not Jo’s only power, and it was not Alcott’s, and it is not yours or mine. It’s just a part of a larger story, stretching back through time, starting at a small desk when a seamstress decided to become a nurse.
I THINK ABOUT
HOW SHE CONVERTED
HER INSECURITY INTO
ACTION
A New
Ideal Photography by Barrett Sweger
The beauty industry is changing how it speaks to consumers and revolutionizing the products it creates. The new standard? Out with the too-perfect, in with the real. Words by Archana Ram. Smooth-as-a-baby legs, a luscious pout, hair so glossy you can see your reflection in it—for years these were the images of beauty presented to us on a pedestal. The goal was, to put it simply, perfection, or rather, a homogenized version of it, with no consideration given to individuality. But the tide has begun to shift. A new wave of industry leaders are flipping the script, ditching hyper-airbrushed looks and, instead, encouraging people to celebrate and find strength in their own beauty. Think Billie razors showing models with body hair (something previously unheard of for a hair removal brand) or Fenty Beauty’s commitment to conjuring truly comprehensive color palettes. To dig deeper into the evolving industry, we talked to Prose cofounder Paul Michaux about what’s motivating this shift, how his brand is founded on personal expression, and why individuality in beauty is the ultimate power play.
Q: Before founding Prose, you worked at L’Oréal and Christian Dior. What did the beauty industry look like when you were starting out? A: My first beauty experience was when I was 16. I went to work for Clarins in Neuilly Sur Seine near Paris as a mailman. I was actually just trying to earn money to buy a computer! I came to the U.S. in 2015 for a job in digital at L’Oréal which is where I first worked with [my Prose cofounder] Arnaud Plas. We chatted a lot about what we liked and disliked about the beauty industry. These big beauty corporations would rely on tactics that started with segmentation: research and development comes up with an innovation, then marketing uses it in product launches. It’s a model that’s about pushing more products, so many products that you don’t even know what they’re doing anymore! It’s
A New Ideal
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through those conversations that the idea for Prose was born. Back then in 2016 hair product marketing and innovation was more about the retailer than the customer. Yet people were still complaining about bad hair days, so we thought there was something to be done here. Everyone’s hair is so unique, but it was a beauty sector where inclusivity had not been matched with products. So we wondered, how can we cater to that? And we discovered customization was the way.
Q. Since your start, the industry has changed significantly. It’s less about hard-to-attain, overly perfect hair, and more about realism. What do you think is driving these broader perceptions? A: Beauty used to be very ego-driven and marketing played on this aspect, but as a society, we’ve begun to reject overly-styled and Photoshopped hair because it’s just unrealistic. We want to see ourselves represented in the world around us. And that’s as true for fashion and film as it is for haircare. There is no singular miracle product that will transform someone’s real, everyday hair into a retouched blowout. Thankfully that’s no longer what we aspire to; instead, we aspire to be our most authentic selves, without sacrificing health or emotional wellbeing. Prose’s values have always been deeply rooted in celebrating personal expression. It’s about accepting the gift of who you were born to be.
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Q. What’s social media’s role in all this? A: Because of how we’re connected digitally, in general we’re exposed to many more pictures of others and also of ourselves. This obviously comes with its own issues, but I believe that it also can bring us closer to a real definition of what beauty is—something more natural, genuine, relatable, and accessible. People are more willing now to show vulnerabilities and what were once considered imperfections. Now beauty just means a better version of who you are—not the supermodel on the cover of a magazine. And with new idols come new standards. Brands now exist through the visual representations that real people create about them and no longer through the sole lens of their advertisements.
Q. Prose takes it a step further, designing not for hair types but for the individual. Why was that important? A: We wanted to understand the origin of the problem. For example, do you have dry hair because you’re spending time at the beach or because you color your hair? With that type of information we can finally create the correct formula for each individual’s needs. It was a lot of work to come up with the quiz we use for each customer. We worked with the chemists and hairstylists to make sure we were collecting the right data to generate the perfect formula, making sure the customer
could answer the questions in a simple way. We’re truly custom—if we get the wrong data, we get the wrong formula. Back in 2016, there were only one-click brands and here we were asking people to go through 25 questions. But we tested it extensively and I spent a lot of time talking to people about their hair. People have so much to say about it!
Q. How do you think the industry is going to evolve for the customer? A: I believe customization is here to stay. It’s an obvious answer to address people’s needs and sustainability challenges. For one, you’re not wasting precious time trying to figure out your beauty regimen. You’re not only saving your money by foregoing all the trial and error, but you’re also not putting your hair through the trauma of experimentation. And when your custom formula works for you, you’re not throwing it in the trash. Plus, the understanding that what you put on your body has an effect on how you look and how you feel—that merging of beauty and wellness—will grow even more. People know what’s not good for the environment is not good for you. It’s about a more holistic approach to beauty.
between dirt and debris in drains, light up.
Ode
to
hair
my I scissored you at the
scrunchy
May you glow with
the weight of love
Ode
to my
I won’t be gone until you are.
Reprinted with the permission of University of Nebraska Press from Hard Damage (2019) by Aria Aber. Copyright 2019 by Aria Aber.
Exotic, “omg so thick,” a rug, so to speak— black cortex, I can almost be beautiful with you. Once, mother snatched my split ends like newly acquired money and named them Taliban Beard. I never wanted this much of anything, so I scissored you at the scrunchy and sold you all to the World Wide Web. In plastic bags, you were shipped next to different manes, the past stored in your filaments like fetuses in formaldehyde, fragrances distending as if skin of people huddled into the eyeless belly of a boat at night. Cut and alone, dark keratin lies cold in factory halls: congregation of wait, you’re patient until you too are wanted. But when my spools stop, and the silence holds— let them braid you into other heads. Let them brush you for my funeral. Let those of you spared on hospital tiles, picked from lovers’ teeth, and nestled deep in the vacuum, or shampooed between dirt and debris in drains, light up. May you glow with the weight of love you can only share with what pries out of yourself. Those stuck to balloons, left in brushes, escapees taken away to elsewhere— what is to be said of you? I won’t be gone until you are. Heavy root that rots to bloom when I shrink— stay and conquer the sargasso in my tomb.
Poem by Aria Aber
Ode to My Hair
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ISSUE 02 POWER At Length is a quarterly magazine created by Prose. The publication explores the intricacies of hair and all of the ways in which it influences our culture, our daily lives and our personal choices.