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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.
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.)
I’d been feeling a bit ’70s myself, having recently seen Stereophonic, David Adjmi’s play partly based on the making of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. And yet, I feared the shag was maybe one of those cuts better suited for people who have either perfect bone structure or deep reserves of cool and can therefore afford to take risks in other departments. When I told some friends about my plan, one called me brave and another said it was ideal that the hair appointment was my last engagement in New York. That way, I could retreat to St. Louis, where I’m currently teaching and where my social circle is rather small, to grow it out in relative isolation, like a scandalously pregnant 19th-century French heroine banished to the country to have her baby.
Weinberg assuaged my concerns. Not only was she clearly a pro, one who specializes in retro-inspired cuts, she steered me away from shaggy mullet (or shullet) territory, explaining that the shag can just as easily be a bombshell haircut—less Ziggy Stardust and more Farrah Fawcett—if still a defiant one. Travis Speck, a senior stylist at the Manhattan salon Suite Caroline, agreed. “To me, shags are always a reflection of women still wanting to have something that feels attractive, but also kind of breaking away from what feels traditionally pretty,” he said. If the ’60s were about growing out your mother’s bouffant, he added, the shag took that statement and “made it louder.” The shag, then, would seem to offer a less polite path to bohemianism than the long- and wavy-haired Chloé girl we’ve seen so much of lately—and a timely one too. Speck has noted an uptick in requests for shags since the election, and while the revolution will probably not start at the salon, it’s nice to remember that style is one small way to telegraph resistance.
Also comforting: In addition to being versatile, the shag turns out to be low-maintenance. I had visions of wrestling with a blow-dryer to try to make the layers flip in the same direction and the bangs land somewhere other than on my eyeballs, but Weinberg said all I’d really have to do in the way of styling was enhance the texture at the roots (I like Kérastase’s dry shampoo) and add extra hydration (try Aveda’s Nutri-Plenish treatment or Bumble and Bumble’s hair oil) at the ends—the suggestion being that a person with a shag has better, more urgent things to do than their hair. I like to add a quick spritz of Dior’s Oud Rosewood hair perfume for an extra dose of vintage vibes.
Had I not had a flight to catch, I would have gladly shown off my cut all around town, but I still had to face a crowd potentially more withering than my New York media–type friends: my Gen Z students, whom, I’d been advised, by someone who had learned the hard way, I should under no circumstances try to impress. Imagine my delight when one after-class lingerer complimented my look.
“Oh, really?” I said, self-consciously touching my bangs. “I’m still getting used to it.”
It was very me, she said—“edgy-cool.”
Maybe the haircut had tricked her, I thought, and I should trade my High Sports for leather pants to shore up the illusion. Or maybe I’d opened up a realm of authentic possibilities, and not all of them aesthetic. As Fonda wrote in her autobiography, “I knew right away that I could do life differently with this hair.”