This Season's Strangest Hair Trend

Alix Browne



The Bad Bang Theory:Why would any woman in her right mind pay good money to look like she gave herself a bad haircut?

In one of the Prada ads from last spring, Eva Herzigova is standing against a black backdrop wearing a striped crop top and a shiny leather jacket, clutching a large white handbag. With such a sporty-chic ensemble, the 40-year-old model could easily be taken for an urban soccer mom, save for one minor but telling detail: her haircut. Her bangs have a distracted, slightly demented quality, as if Guido Palau, the stylist responsible for them, had been on the phone with his accountant while he was cutting them. Or as if Herzigova herself had cut them. With safety scissors. In the dark. Drunk.

This, in my opinion, is a good thing. If there is anything that makes me cringe, it's a "nice" haircut. In that telling moment when the hairstylist proudly hands you a mirror and swivels the chair around so that you can get the back view, I usually find myself saying, "Thanks, it looks really…nice," when what I actually mean to say is, "Um, can't you fuck it up just a little bit?" Then I go into the changing room, whip off the salon robe, and pull my hair back into an elastic band. With all due respect to my 3-year-old daughter, the last thing I want to walk out of a salon looking like is a middle-aged mom, which is exactly the kind of woman I associate with a nice haircut and which, admittedly, I am.

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Weirdly, there seems to be a lot of deliberately bad hair around these days. Uneven bangs. Lopsided bobs. Scissor marks that resemble the tracks left by those kids who stole your car and then used it to do doughnuts on your front lawn. Seemingly haphazard haircuts like the one the stylist Malcolm Edwards created for a story in this magazine's May issue. The model Juliana Schurig may be wearing a Dior Haute Couture dress, but the effect Edwards was going for with his zigzag coif was that of "a kid who cut her hair with the kitchen scissors," he says. But of course, for that shoot, Schurig was wearing a wig.
As was Lena Dunham when she shot the dramatic season finale of Girls, in which she hacks away recklessly at her tresses without so much as a YouTube video to guide her hand. Dunham, in fact, has a sassy but ultimately very cute pixie cut.

I am convinced I am witnessing actual bad hair, however, when I see photos of Marion Cotillard from the Tokyo premiere of Rust and Bone sporting a weird bang that some beauty bloggers would speculate was designed to mimic the asymmetrical hemline of her Dior dress. She looks cool and quirky, befitting an actress known for taking on unconventional roles like a whale trainer-turned-double amputee. But, according to Robert Vetica, Cotillard's longtime stylist, not only was the haircut not at all premeditated, it wasn't even real. "It's a clip-on piece," he tells me over the phone from Beverly Hills, where he recently opened a salon in the SLS Hotel and where you know women aren't beating a path to his door to pay hundreds of dollars to look like they cut their hair themselves. (An ad on his Facebook page vehemently declares, "A bad-hair day on your wedding day is not an option!") "And last year at the Met ball?" Vetica adds, referring to Cotillard's gnarly fringe. "That was a piece, too."

In all fairness, as Vetica points out, for women like Cotillard, such an extreme look can be a professional liability. Who knows? Her next big part could very well be a TriBeCa soccer mom. But there are plenty of women out there for whom a bad haircut is a badge of honor-and one they don't take off when the party is over.

Read the full story and see more celebs rocking this funky trend here

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