When Blondie dropped its self-titled debut album in 1976, Debbie Harry, the band’s platinum-haired front woman, earned herself a nickname she’s never quite been able to shake. For good reason: With a doll-like face and a raw, no-rules approach to hair, Harry defined a propulsive era in music, fashion, and, yes, hair color. Forty years on, she remains an influential (and Instagrammable) style icon for a rising generation experimenting with peroxide.
Still flaxen and still singing at 71, Harry recently unspooled her history with her signature shade in a conversation with Vogue, an excerpt of which appears in the December issue. While the rock star inspired her band’s name (it’s a riff on the catcalls she heard on the city streets), the two weren’t one and the same. In 1978, “the manager we had at the time suddenly arrived with these buttons that said, ‘Blondie Is a Group’—I was kind of shocked!” Harry recalled of the pink-and-black pins. “I told the guys [in the band] that they should all bleach their hair, but they absolutely refused,” she added with a laugh.
Precocious, punk, picture-perfect for lensmen like Warhol: Harry has proved to be all of these things. Here, she muses on her first dye job, her trial-by-fire hair transformations on tour, and why the occasional departures from blonde—first as a solo artist and later in David Cronenberg’s cult classic Videodrome—served to reinforce her sense of self.
The post How Blondie’s Debbie Harry Redefined Platinum Hair for the Punk Era appeared first on Vogue.
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