WHY A BOB’s just the job
It’s said to be the perfect corona cut when hairdressers finally reopen. Here, a lifelong devotee tells why it’s a cut above
tHE year was 1976, figure skater Dorothy Hamill was dominating the Winter Olympics, and in suburban Reading my mother was giving her unwilling daughter an approximation of Hamill’s short pageboy bob.
I always wanted long, curly hair, because the little girl who lived next door told me that angels had hair like that.
But what I had was fine and mousy. My mother had rightly decided that limp, brown hair needs all the help it can get from its cut, and a lifetime of being bobbed began.
I never really experimented with anything else, except for in my early 20s when I challenged myself not to have a haircut until I’d finished my PhD thesis. The end of four years of drudgery was marked by the wonderful sound of snipping scissors.
I was too young to appreciate it, but my bob has a history as the hairstyle of the emancipated woman.
Popularised by the flappers of the 1920s, it’s the cut of liberation. With their knock-kneed dances and louche lifestyles, the flappers adopted the bob for the freedom it gave them from the tyranny of combing, curling and dressing long locks.
HOWEvER, I’ve been surprised to hear that the bob is the lockdown haircut of choice. It’s been hailed as the low-maintenance way to get through the period when the salons are closed.
It’s supposed to be the most hygienic hairstyle too. A bob means less time in the hairdresser’s chair and does not require a blow-dry (research suggests Covid-19 could be spread in salons by the blasting of hairdryers).
I’m a bit dubious, because the gentle kink in my own hair always looks best blown sleekly out — though I admit I haven’t bothered with the hairdryer for weeks.
I’m lucky enough to have had the same dream hairdresser for many years. Ange watches my Tv programmes, and often says something like: ‘I saw you on the box last night and I think the back’s not quite working. I’m going to do it different.’
Fortuitously, a few days before lockdown I went to see Ange for what seemed like a drastically short cut. She said it would ‘last longer’. She was right: 13 weeks later it still has some shape.
However, I think I’m going to be the second client through the door of the salon when it reopens, and that’s only because someone else was even quicker off the mark than me when bookings reopened.
Though no one’s ever asked me to change my hair, many people over the years have tried to wean me off my hair-clip, which I wear partly in homage to my spiritual sisters the flappers, partly for practicality.
When I was asked to front a series for BBC Two, I was told I should look more grown up and ‘authoritative’. I was marched to a ‘destination salon’ in London’s Mayfair, and sent home with a new, fluffier, fringier bob. At home, I secretly wept. I hated it.
As my fringe grew out, I convinced the Tv bosses that any authority I might have lay in my historical knowledge rather than a hair-clip.
You might say I’m stuck in a hair rut but everything comes back into fashion if you wait long enough. My bob and I are going to make the most of being in vogue.