Style: What’s with the hair?

2009/09/05

Young men are cross-breeding hairstyles into hybrids unknown to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hair Hall of Fame — and proud of it, writes DAVID COLMAN

BRITISH heart-throb Robert Pattinson — he of the wild, teased mane — may stand alone in this summer’s teenage-adulation market; US Weekly published its first-ever “bookazine” about him and his Twilight co-stars, a decision Janice Min, then editor, chalked up to a “hunk recession”.

His hair, however, has plenty of competition.

There is a minor eruption of major hair atop young American male populace — and, as hair is wont to do, it’s growing.

Curiously, the look is not one of style as much as degree. There is no army of winsomely tousled RPattz clones. Instead, there are Afros, mohawks, dreadlocks and pompadours.

There are “Idol”-ised punky pincushions, Allmanesque hippie cascades (with matching beards) and Bowie-style, parti-coloured shags. And these are just the styles that have names.

There is a minor eruption of major hair atop young American male populace

Often enough, these clever young dandies are cross-breeding styles into hybrids unknown to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hair Hall of Fame. As one might expect, they are proud of the fact.

Victor Jeffreys II, who has a giant Afro, refers proudly to what he calls his “non-normative hair”. Cameron Cooper, a fashion stylist, refers to his creatively shaved skull as “the exclamation point at the end of my sentence”.

These men are what British-born Canadian journalist, author and pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell might call hair outliers (and his own Afro would get him right into the club).

Still, spotting them is not hard. Just nip into an edgy salon like Woodley & Bunny in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or run some fatally hip gantlet like the summertime Warm Up parties at P.S. 1 in Queens or openings at 3rd Ward in Bushwick, and you are all but sure to run headlong into an expressive excrescence or two.

“All of a sudden, a big wave of guys just want to experiment,” said Marguerite Jukes, a stylist at the Bumble and bumble salon in the meatpacking district, where the shagadelic manes of the Broadway cast of Hair are faithfully kept up.

“No one just wants a trim anymore. There isn’t one particular look; it’s a little bit of everything.”

Jukes has even become an expert at getting the look not quite perfect, “so it looks like they cut it themselves in their bathroom”.

Often guys who are after a more extreme look will drop the name of some rocker — Robert Plant, Simon Le Bon, Robert Smith, Anthony Kiedis — as inspiration.

But what makes this curious trend even more curious is how little connection the hair actually has to the moment, the man or the music that spawned it.

That guy with the long, brown hair and beard may well have techno on his iPod, and the guy with the dyed blue shag is as likely to be drumming his fingers in time to death metal.

“You can never tell what they’re into from their hair,” Jukes said.

She pointed out that her boyfriend, Ben Koller of the metalcore band Converge, has gone for the early-1970s look of the teenage John Michael Osbourne (back when he was the lead singer of Black Sabbath).

His band, however, favours a chaotic clash of punk and metal that makes Black Sabbath’s 1970 hit Paranoid sound like Doris Day.

And however you thought American Idol 8 runner-up Adam Lambert’s hairstyle pegged him, it was clear to American Idol audiences that musically, at least, the man’s got range.

Once upon a time — say, 40 years ago this week, when long-hairs thronged to Woodstock by the hundreds of thousands — you got a hairstyle to show the world your affiliation, to brandish a cultural identity defined by your musical tastes, your political views or how depressed you were.

But such literal interpretations of hair appear to be utterly passé, even if the hairstyles themselves are not.

“I don’t think it defines people at all anymore,” said James Carpinello, who, six nights a week, dons a long blond wig and skintight white leather pants to play the fictional 1980s rocker Stacee Jaxx in Broadway’s hilarious hair-metal musical Rock of Ages.”

Practising for the role never felt quite right, he said, until the day he got to put on “the hair.” (He never calls it a wig.)

“I needed something, and it was the hair,” he said, chuckling. “It makes everything come together.”

And now that “the hair” covers up his own, he has been inspired to let his own grow. He slicked it into a 1930s style for the Tony Awards but that was only the beginning.

“I’ve got this thick pomade,” he said, “and I used that and kind of pulled my hair out so I looked like I’d stuck my finger in a socket. On the train, people were looking at me like I was out of my mind, but I thought it was hysterical. Now I want to grow it out so I can have a ponytail.”

Even though he swings a blond wig around for work, Carpinello may represent the more average guy, simply experimenting rather than going for an out-there style that, should an in-law or a job interview pop up, would call for a hat.

Fashionable hair care companies like Kiehl’s, Shu Uemura and Bumble and bumble report that sales of the more extreme products — strong gels, pomades, pastes and waxes — are up sharply of late, with male customers accounting for much of the increase. But what comes out of the bathroom is anyone’s guess.

“Back in the 1960s, the only important thing was length,” said Michael McDonald, the costume (and hair) designer for the Hair Broadway revival.

“It wasn’t until the 1970s, and the disco era, that men’s hair started to really have ‘style.’ And then every moment had its look, so that now, in the 21st century, we’ve pretty much seen everything wacky you can do to your hair. It’s all there to go back to and interpret.”

McDonald can generally spot the inspirations.

“There’s a little bit of everything,” he said. “Maybe it’s a little Flock of Seagulls, maybe a little Backstreet Boys.”

But there the trail goes dead. If the hair is goth, the clothes might be skater-cum-prep, and the shoes rockabilly.

“It’s all mixed up so beautifully,” he said. “It’s really neat the way they can just cut and paste.”

It may be jarring to casual onlookers — those of us accustomed to thinking that hippie hair goes with pacifism and the Grateful Dead, while mohawks go with Anarchy in the UK — but the guys who are taking the do but leaving its roots have no more qualms about it than a D.J. who samples from other songs.

“I know I’m not a trailblazer,” said Cooper, the fashion stylist. “To me, it’s just personal. It’s a creative outlet.”

And for some, having statement hair can be a way to avoid being pigeonholed. Jeffreys, who works as a hedge fund analyst and moonlights as a fine arts photographer, has had his Afro for several years, through college and various undergraduate jobs, because, first and foremost, it is easy to maintain — just an occasional brushing.

“But it would be a lie to say I didn’t like the way it looks,” he said. Having been a cultural anthropology major at Duke who spent time in Ghana, he has long noticed how hair works as a kind of ID.

“Hair really links you to community, whether you’re a punk rocker or a woman who braids her hair a certain way because she’s from Klikor,” he said.

As the son of a Costa Rican mother and a white American father, Jeffreys grew up keenly aware of the tiny visual cues people search for in determining approximately who a person is. His Afro, he said, kind of shortens the process.

“Those things that our culture puts a lot of value on — gender, race, sexuality, socio-economic class — I’ve had to mediate them all to get anything done in my life, so I’ve tried not to get fixated on any of them.”

For a generation that is, courtesy of the Internet, both disconnected from and connected to the past like no other before it, it makes sense that this point-and-click, cut-and-paste attitude should be present even in the one arena of style in which virtually every man grows his own.

So what if you find yourself wondering: Who is that guy? What’s the deal with that hair? What does it all mean?

To turn an old ad slogan on its head: Not even his hairdresser knows for sure. — NYT