Some know what works well for them, hair-wise, and stick sensibly to it. Then there are those who eschew trims and other subtleties so as to look—post-haircut—conspicuously different. This logic works well in New York City, the kind of place where people embrace the promise of transformation. I’m generally in the latter camp, cycling between long hair and a bob.
Before I found myself in Lizzy Weinberg’s chair at HairThrone on the Lower East Side, however, I’d never had a proper shag, a cut that is characterized by a profusion of feathery layers and has lately reentered the zeitgeist. At Louis Vuitton’s spring show, short locks around the crown sat atop shoulder-grazing curls. At Stella McCartney, the shags were shorter and more angled—almost diamond-shaped as they tapered to a near point at the back of the neck. Shaggy bangs cascaded down the sides of the face at Loewe and, at Miu Miu, swept across the forehead as if they’d been blown out of place by the wind. Models for Bottega Veneta, meanwhile, wore shag wigs made of strands of leather.
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These shags, of course, owe a debt to those that came before. It was the 1971 thriller Klute, starring Jane Fonda—with ample fringe and face-framing pieces—that popularized the look. In this movie, Fonda’s hair moves when she moves, catches the moody light, and lends her character, a sex worker embroiled in a missing person’s case, some much-needed toughness. A bit of shag lore: The actor didn’t actually get the cut for Klute; five months before filming, she had what she’s called a hair epiphany and made her way to the East Village to see the longshoreman turned celebrity stylist Paul McGregor (who some say inspired the movie Shampoo). After that, the shag, at once meticulous and messy, became associated with ’70s rockers such as Stevie Nicks and Mick Jagger, and there’s been a more or less steady stream of revivers ever since, from Tina Turner to Meg Ryan to Julian Casablancas to Zendaya to Natasha Lyonne to Greta Lee. (My personal favorite will always be the troubled loner played by Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club.)
