Hillary’s Hair Evolution: From Coed to Presidential Candidate

If there has been plenty of talk about hair during this election, Hillary Clinton has beaten the headlines to the punch. She’s been joking about her own hair for years, and even made a video about her changing styles in 1995 for the annual Gridiron Club dinner that year. Still, looking back at the ways in which Clinton has adapted her hair to suit her various life stages is fascinating. She has chopped it, grown it, tucked it, dyed it, and shaped it for new careers, changing public and personal roles, and political contests. She even told a graduating class at Yale, “Pay attention to your hair, because everyone else will.”

A simple search of the words Hillary and haircut brings up the extraordinary amount of ink that’s been shed on the subject over Clinton’s roughly four decades in politics. All along, Clinton herself has also clearly been paying attention. A look through archival images confirms that she’s no style slouch. As her intense desire to shape American public policy grew, Clinton took on one new job after the next and sported a corresponding hairstyle to match. She famously joked, in 1995, “If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.”

A shoulder-length flip shows an early command of poise during Clinton’s senior year at Maine East High School in Illinois, and her long Wellesley College locks fit her college years, culminating in a confrontational commencement speech in 1969. As a lawyer and working mom, Clinton wore a shoulder-length bob with bangs, a clean and neat look that was as approachable as it was polished. Once she became First Lady, she grew out her locks and kept them elegantly swept back, though the headbands she employed during that era earned her even more ink.

By her successful 2000 bid to become a New York senator, Clinton embraced a short, layered cut, settling on a clean, above-the-shoulder look favored by women in politics from Elizabeth Warren to Angela Merkel. The style is so universally employed, it’s even become fodder for jokes on Veep, the Julia Louis-Dreyfus–starring satire series complete with a no-nonsense version of the cut for former Vice President Selina Meyer.

The wide spectrum of Clinton’s cuts and styles shows that a confident sense of self and a clear assurance of purpose has emerged as she settled on a short, feathered bob for her current groundbreaking presidential run. Indeed, Clinton has already outlined her strategy for aging in the oval office. “I’ve been coloring my hair for years,” she said last year. “You’re not going to see me turn white in the White House.”

 

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