When you think about it (OK, not too much), the whole of recent cultural history can be boiled down to the bob vs. the shag, the two hairstyles that have dominated the last four decades of style.
Each represents a distinct moment in time, and whenever either is reincarnated - countless times now - it resurrects the mood of that original moment, albeit slightly fuzzy around the edges.
“It is cyclical,” says Laurent Dufourg, who owns the Prive salons in Los Angeles and New York. “We try to reinvent the wheel all the time, but in the end, it comes down to these two looks.”
The bob, popularized in the '20s (though offered by Antoine of Paris as early as 1913), arrived at the dawn of modern feminism. In the '60s, it took on a modernist cast when Vidal Sassoon revived it with new angles.
The shag came along with the sexual revolution in the '70s. It was allowed - indeed, supposed - to look messy. From Jane Fonda in Klute to rock stars both male and female, the look of the moment was just-out-of-bed.
If the bob had grown classic over the decades, the shag was iconoclastic. And so the dichotomy was born: The bob is efficient; the shag, romantic. The bob is all business; the shag, fun-loving. The bob remains an upright citizen, but the shag's a rebel.
Recently, the two looks have coexisted peacefully. Hilary Swank, Cameron Diaz, and Renee Zellwegger favor crisp bobs as practiced by Frederic Fekkai, John Barrett, Garren, Art Luna, and Sassoon's Eugene Souleiman. But Chrissie Hynde, Denise Richards, and Kirsten Dunst prefer the shags that Sally Hershberger, John Sahag, Chris McMillan, and Dufourg specialize in.
Yet somewhere around the creation of Jennifer Aniston's multilevel “Rachel” by McMillan and Meg Ryan's “bobby shag” by Hershberger, the mounting questions couldn't be ignored. Is it still a bob if there are layers around the face? Is it a shag if the bottom of the hair is blunt and weighted? And how can last year have been “all about” the bob if the shag came back so quickly?
The fact is, these once polar opposites are now merging. Take Karolina Kurkova, with her fringy bangs and layered lengths, or Natasha Vojnovic's three-tiered bob.
“You can call it the shaggy bob or the bobby shag, since it's all about the crossover now,” Dufourg explains. “It depends on the texture of the hair.”
“Now it's through layering that you make shapes,” Sahag adds. “Even if I cut hair chin-length, I'll chip into it to make it uneven and chop the ends. The name `bob' doesn't mean anything anymore. Nor does `shag.' To me, we're far past these simplistic names.”
Not quite - as long as you're willing (ahem) to split hairs. Hershberger delineates the styles this way: “A shag is more layered on top - Joan Jett, Chrissie Hynde. In the choppy bob, the layers are longer - Carmen Kass, Bridget Hall. Even Madonna's hair looks like that right now.”
Whether you go for the shaggy bob or the bobby shag, Hershberger has one caveat: “Hair can't be too neat. That's not foxy.”
First Published November 8, 2001, 12:06 p.m.