Forget Kate Middleton’s choppy bangs. A pair of nail scissors might be this season’s secret accessory: the hacked off fringe – a style we’re dubbing the road trip – is the haircut to have. Expensive salon treatments and My Little Pony colours are so over. Those nail scissors, and an Edward Scissorhands-like sense of abandon, are all you need.
Lady Gaga debuted her new fringe earlier this month – and had that halfway-up-the-forehead look that smacks of cutting it in the wing mirror, and – to all those who have seen Chappie – the girl from Die Antwoord, Yolandi. This caused the South African band to react angrily on Instagram, calling Gaga a “parasite” no less.
The road-trip fringe could be seen on, ahem, other “parasites” at the London shows last week. Sure, Edie Campbell’s shaggy number and Mica Arganaraz’s 80s curls are all very covetable, but they look like they require some kind of maintanence, and possibly a hairdryer. Far better the road-trip fringe, as seen at Christopher Kane, where most of the models wore fringes, and on Irina Kravchenko, at Margaret Howell.
Of course, while Yolandi is the poster girl of the road-trip fringe in 2015, even she would have to admit that there are precedents for nail-scissor haircuts. Most notably, these come from the 90s – the decade that everyone is trying to out-nerd each other on at the moment. See Emma Balfour’s long crop with mismatched lengths, Karen Elson as “fashion’s hottest property” on the cover of The Face in 1997, and Juliette Lewis’s various haircuts in 1994’s Natural Born Killers. Since that film actually involves a road trip of sorts, she probably wins – even 21 years later. Yolandi, though, can claim to take her nail-scissor work to new heights, with the front so short it’s almost cropped. Her haircut could be dubbed the high-speed road trip, perhaps. We’ll have to wait and see if others can keep up.
