The Micro Bob Haircut Trend
See, there’s a reason this look had me #shewkt to the core, and the reason is this: It. Actually. Made. Sense. Not because it was perfectly on-theme for the night (it was), or that it was a look that’s—as ivory-towerers love to proclaim—as basic and ubiquitous as hair gummy bears and Instagram teatoxes (it wasn’t). But for some reason, the micro bob haircut struck quite a chord in me, and not just because the few celebs who donned the hairstyle—and there were a few—worked every angle to a T.
Vintage roots
We all equated the micro bob haircut as the famous Flapper look of the glamorous Roaring Twenties. It was the haircut of the rebel, the femme fatale and the iconoclast, for the woman who went against the grain and rose up, fists raised high and standards raised even higher. It was First Generation Woke Hair. And then there’s the micro fringe, which is a whole other study in subversive beauty altogether. Now that we’re finding ourselves, curiously enough, in quite a similar predicament, the renaissance of this look strikes home. I know, you’ve got a witty sign on the ready, and you’re as progressive as they come; but it does get tiresome and frustrating and honestly, a bit grating to constantly walk around, raw-nerve-like, with your beliefs on your sleeve. But then again, it’s 2017 (as in, almost a whole century after the Flapper bob came about, just FYI), and women are still finding themselves on the wrong side of gender politics.
Feathers in the hair like we just don’t care
And then surprisingly enough, this haircut resurfaces—albeit in all its shellacked, hyper-glammed glory, seductively assaulting my social feeds and the 10 o’ clock cable news—and it’s like a symbol, a wake-up call, a little knowing wink that we women know what’s up. We’ve known it for a hundred years, and it may be long in coming, but that we’re not going down without a fight—peacock feathers and a ridiculously short bang be damned. So yeah, it struck home to me. And maybe this time around I’ll actually be alive to see the world take notice.