The Bob Turns 100


The following is from an article in the New York Times on January 8, 2019.

By: Linda Dyett

Among the few notable things about this year’s Golden Globes was that so many women dispensed with long curling-ironed hair or chignons or whatever other frippery and just chopped it. Saoirse Ronan had a lob, or “long bob,” styled by Ben Skervin. Claire Foy: mini-bob. Maya Rudolph: sharp medium-long bob. Lobs, too, for Lucy Boynton (“Bohemian Rhapsody”) and Irina Shayk, a model.
This major bob moment comes exactly 100 years after an avalanche of women — 20,000 per week, according to the Women’s Improvement League — scandalized the world by cutting off their waist-long, painstakingly coiffed Gibson girl dos.
They chose instead an ear-grazing crop cut that until then had been worn only by willful, freethinking renegades — Bolsheviks, the Bloomsbury set, the up-and-coming Coco Chanel, Greenwich Village radicals, the fashion-forward ballroom dancer Irene Castle, who catapulted the bob into the American mainstream.
Already alert to cultural disruptions, F. Scott Fitzgerald, then 22, promptly wrote a short story, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” about the power of this new haircut on a hapless girl from Eau Claire, Wis., sent east to acquire social skills. Faced with taunts and dares, she marches into a barbershop, gets a bob and overnight is transformed into a ruthless, avenging, slash-and-burn Jazz Age vamp.

Fitzgerald was prescient about this as so much else. The bob, while now a classic, has never quite lost its unladylike insouciance. Even today, “switching to a bob is a little bit like giving the finger,” said Yves Durif, the New York hairstylist.
As if on cue at the start of 2019, this cheeky haircut has resumed its role as a take-no-prisoners rebuke to those long tresses, cascading below the shoulders, that have dominated the opening decades of the 21st century.
Mr. Durif, whose clients at his Carlyle Hotel salon include MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Kasie Hunt, called this Trump-era Lady Godiva look “clichéd and banal.”
“Long hair isn’t even interesting on the runway shows anymore,” said Julie Stahl, the C.E.O. of Blonde & Co., a New York creative content agency.
Ahn Co Tran, a hairstylist with a salon in Beverly Hills, said he cuts “oh my God, ever so many bobs.” They’re not a deluge (yet), but more and more are happening in the larger cities.

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