Why I’ve Had the Same Haircut All My Life

The hidden history of the bob — and the moment television tried to change mine

The year was 1976. Dorothy Hamill was winning Olympic gold with a haircut that swung neatly as she skated. She looked brisk, practical, and somehow very reassuring.

And in suburban Reading, my mother was attempting something similar on me.

I wasn’t keen.

What I wanted — very firmly — was long, curly hair. Because the little girl next door had told me that angels had hair like that, and I saw no reason to aim lower.

Instead, I had hair that was fine, straight, and what can only be described as disappointingly limp. My mother, entirely correctly, decided it needed help. And so it was cut into a bob. And then cut again. And again.

I’ve had variations on the same thing ever since.

At the time, I assumed this was simply one of those slightly unfair things mothers do to their children. But looking back, I realise I’d been given a haircut with a rather interesting past.

A bob is one of those small everyday things that turns out, on inspection, to carry quite a lot of history.

When young women began cutting their hair short in the early twentieth century, it caused a surprising amount of fuss. Hair wasn’t just hair. Long hair took time, care, and often assistance. It was part of the business of being properly feminine.

Cutting it off was, in its quiet way, quite a statement.

I’ve always liked Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920), in which the act of cutting becomes a sort of social earthquake. Once Bernice’s long hair is gone, everything changes — not just how she looks, but how she’s seen.

And plenty of women of the 1920s understood this perfectly well.

They bobbed their hair not just because it was easier — though it certainly was — but because it suited the kind of lives they were beginning to lead. Working, dancing, moving more freely in a world that had been altered, rather brutally, by the First World War.

It’s a practical haircut.

But it’s never been just practical.

And while I can control my hair, I can’t control how other people read it. That’s where things get a little more complicated!

The rest of this piece involves a Mayfair salon, a professional humiliation, and an argument about whether authority can be measured by a fringe.

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