Did you have a lockdown haircut? Sad to say it, but retribution is coming ...
My hair has crossed the line from “unprofessional” to “downright disrespectful”. Every day that passes since the salons reopened makes it more discourteous still. Ideally, I would go back in time and spend a portion of the time I put into booking tables outside pubs on getting it cut, but that is a small regret compared with the others.
Somehow this lank barnet has infected my self-perception and I now hate all my clothes as well. I feel dowdy, scruffy, slightly stained and careworn, powerfully aware that this would be the right time to buy new stuff, except without any enthusiasm to do so.
I raised the problem with my friend K, who buys new stuff all the time. “You have to think of three words that you want to look like,” she said, and made some suggestions. “Bright? Fun? Fashionable? Chic? Elegant?”
Nope. None of those.
“Serious? Businesslike? Peppy?”
Ha. No. “I want my corporeal self to vanish and to appear as a heart-lifting spirit.”
“Maybe let’s start with the hair.”
But when I plugged back into the hair network, I heard disturbing news. The hairdresser has gone a bit lockdown-fundamentalist; if she suspects you of having had an illegal haircut, she berates you all the way through and then deprioritises your subsequent appointments.
Even if it is months since your offence, she reckons she can always see the ghost of your last haircut and can tell in an instant whether or not she did it – if she didn’t, it follows that you must have broken the rules. She is like a forensic stylist, dispensing vigilante hair justice. Even though I am as safe as houses in this regard, because I look like a train wreck, I am incredibly annoyed by it.
Obviously, it is good to have stuck to the rules during the pandemic; to have done otherwise would have
been to collaborate with the virus or, worse, Laurence Fox. However, I favour an aftermath full of celebration and regeneration, rather than recrimination and judgment. If this means I have to cut my own hair, so be it. This is going to work wonders for my vanity crisis.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
drix’s, although it did pay tribute having been recorded shortly after his death. Troubled guitarist Eddie Hazel even claimed to carry Jimi’s spirit inside him. The title track to Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain (1971) was performed in one take while on LSD, after band leader George Clinton instructed Hazel to play like his mother had died. The resulting solo takes up the entire 10 minutes of this transcendent song. It is a soul-bearing, pain-exorcising, utterly engaging gift from the heavens. It ebbs and flows between lightness and shade. It is delicate and dexterous in some places; cosmically slipshod and backwards-sounding in others. Almost 30 years after Hazel’s own passing, Maggot Brain still feels as defiantly alive as Miles Davis’s most powerful pieces. The guitar solo to beat all solos? It’s that goddamned, motherloving Maggot Brain!
Apair of prototype Nikes worn by Kanye West during his performances of Hey Mama and Stronger at the Grammy Awards in 2008 has shattered the record for a pair of sneakers ever sold.
Sotheby’s announced on Monday that West’s so-called “Grammy Worn” Nike Air Yeezy 1 fetched $1.8m in a private sale. It was acquired by Rares, a sneaker investment marketplace.
The sale marks the highest publicly recorded price for a sneaker sale and the first pair of sneakers to top $1m. Sotheby’s
brokered the private sale.
The size 12 shoes designed by West and Mark Smith are made of soft black leather with perforated detailing throughout the upper, and the heel overlay is branded with a tonal Swoosh. The design features the Yeezy forefoot strap and signature “Y” medallion lacelocks in bright pink.
The price is nearly triple the auction record for a sneaker set in 2020 at Christie’s for $615,000. That was a pair of ’85 Jordan 1s that the basketball superstar wore when he memorably shattered the backboard during a pre-season game in Italy.
“We are thrilled with the result, which has nearly tripled the highest price on record,” Brahm Wachter, Sotheby’s head of streetwear and modern collectables, said in a statement.
“The sale speaks volumes of Kanye’s legacy as one of the most influential clothing and sneaker designers of our time, and of the Yeezy franchise he has built which has become an industry titan.”