The Rise of the Ballerina Top Knot
Ally Betker
If there is any question whether the extreme top knot bun has emerged as fashion's latest hair obsession, one need only look at Céline's fall 2013 campaign. In the series of images by Juergen Teller, model Daria Werbowy wears her hair piled high on her head-braided and wound tight in one shot, cinched with an oversize white bow in another.
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Leave it to Phoebe Philo, a designer whose cool-girl instincts have rarely steered her wrong, to embrace the look this season-and she's not the only one experiencing top knot mania of late. Street style fixtures Chelsea Leyland and Dree Hemingway have been spotted wearing polished-yet-easy incarnations of the look to parties on a regular basis, while red carpet events have turned up sleeker iterations (see Dakota Fanning's neat, glossy updo at the recent Toronto Film Festival).
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Around the Vogue offices, the style has become a practical and pulled-together workday favorite, too. "I [studied] ballet, so it's second nature for me to wear my hair this way," says Vogue.com market editor Chelsea Zalopany, a former dancer who has the top knot technique down to a science. She starts by gathering her hair into a ponytail at the highest point of her head. Next, "you hold the base of the ponytail with one hand, and with the other you twist the [length of your] hair around your pointer finger all the way to the ends," she says. "Then you just wrap that hair around the base of your ponytail, and put your [elastic band] on top. You don't need any product," she says firmly. "I call it the bun of steel."
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