Lena Dunham on Why You Should Cut Your Own Hair at Least Once

With rebellious, home-cut hair influencing the runways, Lena Dunham reflects on her own self-styled history—and the power of picking up the shears.

I will never forget the first time I cut my own bangs: the power, the adrenaline. I was twelve years old, standing in the fluorescent light of my parents’ bathroom with a pair of orange-handled craft scissors, unaware that I was standing on the precipice of self-definition. The sound of the first chop, thick and harsh, was thrilling. I watched my hair pile up in the sink, then looked into the mirror: I had given myself blunt, successive layers that resembled a staircase headed to nowhere. Nothing about the haircut could have been perceived as skilled, fetching, or even sane. But I had never felt more alive.

The reaction at school the next day wasn’t particularly positive, and I wore a bandanna for the rest of the year. But when I’d come home, I liked to remove it and look at myself, Brooklyn’s own Joan of Arc, freed from the tyranny of the Rachel, of chunky blonde highlights, of the invisible contract my friends and I seemed to have signed promising that our hair would reflect some sense of wanting to be wanted. A series of similar experiments followed: my own pixie cut, so oddly shaped it looked like a 1950s Peter Pan wig; Bettie Page bangs blunt at my ears, topped with some drugstore black dye and a pastel clip meant for an infant. Each episode was met with sighs from my parents and confusion from my peers, but I remained committed to the notion that my hair was just for me, another avenue for radical self-reinterpretation.

It’s an idea that is gaining traction in current fashion conversations. Just ask Grace Hartzel. “It’s cool to show your personal style,” the St. Louis–born model says of treating her gamine, Jane Birkin locks as a blank canvas. Hartzel used to dye them a shade of “ugly red” before she hacked her own set of bangs with “cheap scissors” from CVS three years ago. “I was feeling really stuck,” the 21-year-old recalls. “My parents were like, ‘Your career is over. You’re done.’” Hedi Slimane disagreed, casting Hartzel as his fall 2014 exclusive at Saint Laurent and catapulting her—and the exact bangs that sent her parents into paroxysms—into the modeling stratosphere. After debuting a warm honey hue for Slimane’s final Saint Laurent show earlier this year, Hartzel has embraced the season’s growing DIY hair spirit once again, collaborating with hairstylist Guido Palau on a messy, gender-fluid Duran Duran crop with a Blade Runner aggressiveness for Vogue.

There is something appealing about good old-fashioned Breck Girl hair, of course—which I understood briefly when I was sixteen via my best friend at summer camp, Joana. Slim and blonde, she had the perfect glossy mane of an Olsen twin back when they were still making movies about catastrophes in Paris. For the next few years, I worked hard—with a flatiron and Sun-In—to be that blonde, that glossy. Then Joana went to art school. When she arrived in September, she still had her show-pony locks. But by October she had shorn her hair into a mullet even a drag-racing enthusiast in the deepest South wouldn’t understand. The Rod Stewart mayhem on top made way for a stringy waterfall of over-bleached tendrils creeping down her back. Matched with a new wardrobe of spandex pants and obscure band T-shirts, she was even more of a revelation: powerful, beautiful, a little angry.

I, too, dumped a bottle of peroxide on my head shortly thereafter, enlisting Camilla, Oberlin College’s resident stylist, to give me a look that lived somewhere between Lee Krasner and my great-aunt Doad. While traveling in Eastern Europe over winter break, I caught sight of myself in a bookstore window in Kraków and thought, with pride, that I looked like someone for whom beauty was intensely personal.

“The idea of a ‘home haircut’ is really about taking control,” confirms Palau, who has mastered the art of the transformational, punk-inflected makeover, adding a certain level of “wrongness” to the cuts he dreams up at needle-moving shows, like Alexander Wang, so it looks as if they were self-administered by someone with a strong vision of her own identity. “I never thought we’d see a resurgence of this kind of haircutting, but we are,” he adds. “I think there’s something really empowering about that.”

Now, for every Gigi Hadid with her classically sexy lioness’s mane, every Kendall Jenner with her sleek topknot, there’s a Katie Moore with her magenta–turned–surfer blonde mushroom crop and jagged microfringe; an Adwoa Aboah who keeps her hair as ever-changing as her style. The same woman who looks as though she has whacked at her own bob with a razor is permitted a collaged, floral scarf-print Balenciaga dress. What a world.

I still struggle with this dichotomy: I want to feel beautiful in a way people can understand, and yet I want to feel like my own tiny revolution. Every time my hair is blown flat or (God forbid) curled with a small but mighty iron, I lose a piece of myself. It’s taken practice and establishing an almost marital intimacy with my hairstylist Rheanne White for her to understand just the amount of weird I need to feel while also being properly armored for Hollywood’s roughest moments. But I never want to lose that edge, that sense of experimentation that fueled my twelve-year-old boldness (and the baby bangs of a nineties-era Winona I self-trimmed earlier this year). Besides, as Hartzel assures us: “It’ll grow back. It will always grow back.”

Dress: Alexander Wang
Hair: Guido for Redken; Makeup: Diane Kendal
Manicure: Megumi Yamamoto
Fashion Editor: Phyllis Posnick
Produced by Art House

 

 

 

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