I was in my mid-20s before I got my hair cut properly, when the long, raggedy strands that marked my indie sleaze youth no longer felt like an appropriate calling card for my newly forged professional identity. Somehow, my hair had never really grown too far past my shoulders – a combination of backcombing it into week-long beehives (I was a member of the Amy Winehouse generation, after all) and overzealous experiments with peroxide meant that it would fracture or dissolve at a certain length – and the idea of self-care was somewhat foreign to me. My hair was just sort of there, straggly and dishevelled: a material manifestation of my internal state of being.
But, aged 25, I’d begun a new chapter. Embarking on a career as a fashion editor, and determined to shed the chaotic energy that marked my earlier years, I wanted to establish the sort of lifestyle that might accommodate regularly scheduled trips to the hairdresser – starting with Dalston salon Bleach. My friend Cherish, the keyboard player in a psychedelic rock band, had the most perfectly pristine fringed blunt bob – graphic and gothic and unmistakably cool – and I was completely besotted by the image of punk heroes Cosey Fanni Tutti and Lydia Lunch. I wanted in. I paid no mind to the fact that my hair is naturally curly or that I have a cow’s lick, which means that keeping a sleek fringe in check would be a constant ordeal. I had a silhouette – and a woman – in mind, and I was sticking to it.
“Over the past decade, fringes have become an integral part of hair because they form so many guises; they can create so many different characters,” explains hairstylist Luke Hersheson, the architect behind thousands of fringes over the course of his career, and the founder of his eponymous London salons where I have spent hundreds of hours, and which I now consider my second home. “They have so many little nuances: people don’t really recognise how much they can change people’s perception of you and the character you’re portraying.” A decade into my commitment and the power of hindsight means I can attest to exactly that sentiment: that what I was doing, whether intentionally or not, was creating a new character – and leaning into the self-assuredness that accompanied it.
“I think fringes give you an attitude,” explains ever-visionary hairstylist Guido, who was responsible for the resurgence of them at Versace and Sacai this season – the former, glossy and glamorous with a ’70s polish; the latter, imbued with a tousled insouciance. “They give a personality to your haircut – and we’re seeing it with a lot of pop stars: Sabrina Carpenter, whose style is like a modern-day pin-up and who plays up that sexy, retro thing; Taylor Swift, whose bangs are a lot more real and relatable; Chappell Roan, whose are shorter, more edgy, almost medieval. They’ve all adapted their fringe to their character.”
I have long been fascinated by the ways in which women use beauty to project or subvert certain images of themselves: how, for those of us partial to products or treatments, there can be a sense of liberation discovered through self-determinism. “Beauty is not a shallow thing,” Lydia Lunch once told me when I interviewed her for a magazine beauty column (imagine my joy at being able to interrogate my inspiration on her inspiration!). “Learn who and what you are, and become what you want to be: that doesn’t cost anything. A tube of lipstick or hair-dye… not much. You can constantly reinvent everything: your voice, your hair, your looks.” My reinvention was, it seems, framed by my fringe.
My first fringe was longer than how I wear it today, and my hair was too. As my confidence increased, I inched away from it falling into my eyes – which Guido describes as a more entry-level approach – with a near shoulder-length style, towards a short-fringed bob like the sort worn by 1920s film star Clara Bow. To be honest, at this length, it’s nothing short of a nightmare in upkeep. I cannot bear when it touches my eyebrows and, while I’ve learnt to – in dire straits, such as a pandemic – trim it myself, I’m still not very good and so require trips to the salon with alarming regularity (every three weeks; I take a stack of magazines). After all, millimetres matter: “When they’re on your eyebrow, or when they’re a centimetre or two above it, they read as two very different things,” affirms Luke, sympathetically. He also explains that there are many, many lower-maintenance alternatives: sweeping, face-framing bangs, like the actor Mia Goth’s, or textured and curly like Stevie Nicks. But I am not interested in that sort of free-spirited bohemian insouciance.
To that point: I am an expert blow-dryer. Every morning, I wash my hair and within 10 minutes I have it just how I like it.
I don’t use products or hairspray – I don’t like how they change its texture – so I rely on a comb (a simple plastic one; I hoard them from hotels) and a basic barrel brush that I bought long before I realised fancy ones were a thing or had the means to acquire them. During fashion weeks, when it’s rainy and I am in and out of shows from breakfast until midnight, instead of hairspray I keep a portable GHD straightener in the car (it charges straight from my battery pack; there’s no risk of being caught short). I don’t fix my face, but the fringe must remain just so.
Fashion week isn’t the only extreme it endures. In the summer of 2023, I broke my arm terribly in a freak holiday accident and, for nine months, lost the use of my right hand. Instead of embracing a more relaxed aesthetic, I invested in a disability-friendly hairdryer stand that I discovered on Google and a Dyson Airwrap. I distinctly recall buying both on my phone the first night that I spent in the remote Sicilian hospital I ended up in. In my medically induced stupor, with my shattered humerus strapped across my body and my hand flopping uselessly around my chest, I couldn’t bear the idea that I wouldn’t be able to wear my hair how I liked it; that when I eventually made it home I’d be forced to present myself differently. Back in London, friends would come around to wash my hair, but I’d determinedly dry it myself. I like that there’s a composed austerity to my slick, sharp, bob. However quickly it might dissipate, I like that I have an element of control over that first impression, and I wasn’t prepared to lose that and my arm at the same time.
“I am quite particular when it comes to hair – I find that bad hair can ruin a day, a look or a picture,” agrees Paloma Elsesser, one of the foremost champions of micro-bangs, which, when worn by her, oscillate between Audrey Hepburn elegance and riot grrrl rebukes of convention. “I generally love to explore how a fringe brings either an elegance or a subversion to a look. But I tend to lean harder into it, sharpening a version of myself versus transforming into a new character. It’s like the fringe adds an exclamation point to the character that is me.”
I suppose that’s the perfect way of looking at it: that my favourite thing about my fringe isn’t that it entirely transformed me or that it changed my life (short of stealing hundreds of hours of it). It simply framed how I wanted to be seen, adding an exclamation point and presenting a calendar of self-care that I became completely committed to. “I think there’s a fringe, literally, for everyone,” says Luke, and I wholeheartedly endorse the effort for anyone looking for a New Year evolution. “I always say: ‘Never say never,’” says Guido. “Because whatever you’re wearing, it’s the confidence that prevails.” Plus, much to my constant dismay, it’ll always grow back.
So this season, I’ll see you at the salon.
Cover look: embellished minidress, Rabanne. Photograph: Felicity Ingram. Styling: Eniola Dare. Hair: Anna Cofone. Make-up: Hiromi Ueda. Nails: Michelle Class. Production: Chloé Medley. Digital artwork: Dtouch. Model: Greta Hofer