How Blondie’s Debbie Harry Redefined Platinum Hair for the Punk Era Inline

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    “I started dyeing my hair in grade school. My mother became instantly suspicious, and I said, ‘Oh no, it’s the sun, it’s the sun!’ Going blonde was considered naughty at that time, which was very exciting for a young girl like me. I think it was a combination of wanting to look exciting and be part of the blonde heat wave that was going on.”

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    “My hair was brown again when I moved to New York at 19 or 20—though not for long. I was working in a small salon in New Jersey, where we were always doing crazy stuff to our heads, and my friend said, ‘We should bleach your hair!’ It was a good period for experimentation. A lot of the girls downtown were breaking away from what was considered commercial; what we did was recycle a mod-’60s look with more of a ripped-up, tough, street feel.”

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    “As I walked around the city, people would yell, “Blondie!” out their windows, so when Chris Stein and I were looking for a name for our group, I said, ‘Let’s call it Blondie.’ It was sort of an automatic: It already existed in everyone’s consciousness, especially in the United States, because of the comic strip and because of film stars.”

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    “We started going out on the road for months on end, and I would have to chop and color my hair myself. But in rock ’n’ roll, or at least in my interpretation of it, the more radical and disturbing it looked, the better. The only real hairdresser I ever had was Christiaan. He was a friend of Stephen Sprouse and one of the most experimental, experienced guys out there. He encouraged me to keep doing my own blonde because there was no way, with his training and knowledge, that he could do the stupid things that I did. He used to mess my head up with his fingers and say, ‘Somehow, it really works.’ That was around when Andy Warhol and I had the same blonde. It was hilarious. I don’t know how it happened—whether he liked the way that it looked on me, or I liked the way that it looked on him—but there we were with the same damn hair.”

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    “When the group separated in ’82, I made a clear decision: I wasn’t trying to do Blondie without the band. So I got a bunch of these horrifyingly bright wigs—in chartreuse green, pink, blue, and yellow. But people continued to associate the name Blondie with me since I chose to carry on with the bleach all those years. It was just the right thing at the right time. More than 40 years later, it still is. Now there’s just some gray and white mixed in with the blonde.”