The Goldie standard
Jess Cartner-Morley on the strange tale of the hairstyle that has raced from the catwalk to Clarence House
Friday April 14, 2006
The Guardian
The tipping point for any style trend comes when it climbs out of the murky depths of teen culture and makes its first wobbling, colt-like steps into the harsh glare of the adult world. It is one thing to win over bored, hormone-ravaged schoolgirls who, frankly, would wear something as ridiculous as white furry moonboots over pastel tracksuit bottoms if Coleen McLoughlin did - come to think of it, that actually happened - but quite another to gain the backing of sentient, fully formed human beings.
This is why Goldielocks, as the story of the Goldie Hawn Hair Comeback is known, is so striking. Picking up the new issue of Vogue on Tuesday, I was hit by an unmistakable sense of deja vu. Examining the portraits taken by Mario Testino to mark the first royal wedding anniversary, I knew I had seen Camilla's hairstyle somewhere before. And then I remembered: it was on Nicole Richie, who a few days previously had sported exactly the same fringe (albeit as part of a longer, more girlish 'do) at the LA press conference for the new series of The Simple Life.
What's more, I remembered thinking, when I first saw the Richie pictures, how much they reminded me of Sarah Jessica Parker's scene-stealing hairstyle in her new rom-com, Failure to Launch. And, indeed, while watching Failure to Launch, I had found myself much more attracted to said hairstyle than to the charisma-free Matthew McConaughey, and had spent some considerable part of the film musing over the charms of Parker's locks, and comparing them in my mind's eye to the Yves Saint Laurent catwalk show I saw in Paris at the beginning of last month, where the models had - you guessed it - tousled blond locks with beachy, grown-out fringes side-flicked just so to emphasise eyes and cheekbones. From catwalk to Clarence House, via California, in the space of just over a month.
In fashion, familiarity very quickly breeds contempt. So now that poker-straight hair, when very long and very blond, has morphed from the height of silken sophistication to crass, nylon reality-show glamour - hello, Chantelle from Big Brother - it is almost inevitable that this tousled, tawny blond suddenly looks deliciously classy. It is a look which references Goldie Hawn and Farrah Fawcett, all-American glamour girls from another era. These two are beguiling icons, because they project two sets of signals simultaneously: party-girl on the one hand, girl-next-door on the other.
While there is something beachy and wholesome about the puppyish, shaggy fringe - it is the direct opposite not just of the poker-straight Barbie/lapdancer look, but of the harsh, Vicky Pollard scraped-back ponytail - there is also something knowing and foxy about the way the fringe, especially when licking at the rim of a huge pair of sunglasses, can conceal a multitude of sins.
British writer Emma Forrest, who has observed bi-coastal celebrity culture at first hand since moving from New York to Los Angeles earlier this year, calls the look as worn by Richie, Paris Hilton et al "that Studio 54, up-for-three-days coke-wh*re look". It is this reference which gives these girls their essential what-are-they-up-to, they're-having-more-fun-than-me, faux-scurrilous appeal; however, as Forrest notes, for mass appeal in middle America this needs tempering.
"Celebrities these days are minutely aware of how every outfit, every makeup look, every hairstyle, reflects on their image. They can't afford to get it wrong. Hawn and Fawcett had a look that was sexy but innocent. It is a style that today's very knowing celebrities can borrow, to hark back to a less cynical age of celebrity, in the hope that we will see them in that same light."
When viewed in historical context, the cross-cultural, cross-generational appeal of the style makes perfect sense. "The thing about Studio 54," says Forrest, "is that they really did have royalty alongside pop stars and 'it' girls. So if a duchess, a Jewish princess and an American princess are now all wearing the same Studio 54 hairstyle, we have come full circle."
And it is a circle that may widen even yet. At ladies' day at Aintree last week, Coleen McLoughlin proved that she has left the moonboots far behind, wearing a very fetching pair of white city shorts with matching jacket (trust me, it worked) and a demure silk scarf. Her hair? Tawny blond, with a long, sideswept fringe. What else?