I can't say I am thrilled to learn that hair is back in the news.
There is nothing good about hair when it makes headlines.
The last time I remember hearing about hair was in 1993. That was
when President Clinton reportedly closed down air traffic at LAX to
get himself a $200 trim from a fancypants L.A. stylist named
Cristophe Schatteman. Clinton said he had checked with the Secret
Service to make sure the airport would not be affected and that he
did not pay $200. He claims the whole thing was a big
misunderstanding. Maybe so. Who knows? Whatever the case, the
incident caused everybody to be in a lather about the president's
follicles.
Before that episode, the most memorable period for hair stretched
from the mid-'70s to the early '80s These were hair's Dark Ages.
Rock bands, known previously as a scruffy bunch with messy heads,
began emerging on the scene with stylish cuts. So alarming was this
development that the groups created their own subgenre: "hair
bands." Trivializing rock with ostentation (Boston) and artifice
(Duran Duran), their crimes against music were bad. But those were
rectified by punk, which celebrated rock by stripping it down to
its three-chord roots. Which, speaking of roots, those emanating
from the heads of punks were shaped into spikes and mohawks,
lending their movement an endearing, if frightening,
cartoonishness. The hair bands' sins against fashion went
considerably deeper, leading, as they did, to a hairstyle known as
the mullet. Short on top and long in the back, the mullet is more
or less like sporting on one's head a raccoon whose back has caught
on fire. The style launched a thousand late-night jokes and,
according to Google when I entered "mullet haircut" as a search
phrase, about 30,000 websites. That is double the number of
websites of some small countries.