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Looking cool from the scalp down

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Blackbird Spyplane by your side once again.

Today we’ve got hair on our minds, inspired by a recent reader question:

Haircuts! As I’m getting older, I find myself reverting to the same old variations on the tried-and-true “short back and sides, longer on top.” I sometimes miss my younger, more adventurous self, who saw hair(cuts) as a renewable source of fit-enhancing energy. I see a lot of cool younger kids rocking longer messier hair, which has gained a lot of traction recently, I guess.

What are some dope haircuts in this day and age, and do you find the window of hair opportunity to increase or decrease with age due to time, professional appropriateness, or other real and/or imagined factors? — ellerstak

Haircuts connect directly to core questions of how we present ourselves to the world, how we wish we looked, and how our self-conception shifts (or doesn’t) in response to changing trends and changes in our lives & bodies. In my teens and twenties I (Jonah) had a bunch of haircuts that “did too much.” I thought they all looked tight at the time, and when I think back on them now — with a kind of affectionate, semi-embarrassed amusement — I believe they were frequently stupid. As they should have been! That’s a natural & healthy progression.

This reader is far from alone in defaulting to “variations on the tried-and-true ‘short back and sides, longer on top’” — for years now, this is basically what I’ve asked for every time I’ve hit the barbershop, too, thanks to a combination of “knowing what works for me,” decision fatigue, and, yes, timidity. Not dissimilar to why I locked into a single pair of sunglasses for a decade.

Each time I take the barber’s chair, though, a little voice in my big beautiful skull whispers, “Is this all there is, Jonah?” Rather than give it any extended consideration, I tend to go back to thinking about, e.g., pants instead. There are only so many hours in a day.

But while I’m wise & correct about a lot of things, I sometimes wonder: Am I wise & correct in this approach to my hair? Or, by settling into essentially fixed haircut parameters, am I leaving pleasure, “fit-enhancement,” swag, self-expression, self-discovery, and self-renewal on the table?

Erin has her own fraught relationship to haircuts, too. Statistically speaking, I bet ~100% of us do. Among the main “vectors of self-presentation,” after all, hairstyles might be more fraught even than clothes. A garment stays the same, but your hair is a literal living thing that behaves differently every day. What’s more, clothes reflect fungible aesthetic choices (I’m feeling stripes these days, I’m feeling earth tones, etc.) and while hair does, too (I’m feeling bangs) it can also seem to reflect deeper, frustratingly immutable biological truths about us (my hair is straight [but I wish it was curly {because my face is so pointy <whereas I wish it was more rounded, etc., etc.>}])

Come yodel with us atop these big-brain mountain ranges

Today we’re going to dig into the swag semiotics of hair. And even though it’s a wild & woolly topic with as many asterisks and exceptions as there are follicles remaining in David Lynch’s BROLIC hairline, you already know we’re going to serve up craggy-brained definitive insights about how to think about hairstyles as they relate to looking cool.

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I. The “Pic of Brad Pitt” Problem

Let’s begin with an elemental truth. Good haircuts feel good. I mean this, for starters, in the tactile sense. A barber who’s nice with it handles your skull assuredly; tilts it this way and that; sprays some mist on it, maybe shampoos it; runs the tines of a comb across your scalp; then snips, slices and buzzes away the dead weight of hair that was dragging down your dome. You step out feeling proverbially “crispy” because your scalp is catching more air. When you run your fingers through your hair, you feel the pleasantly novel absence of the bulk you were lugging around. Mamma mia that’s good stuff.

And that physical good feeling bleeds seamlessly into an emotional good feeling that can spiral to euphoric heights: “Ayyy I look clean as hell, I was like a snake moving goofy in dull old skin I’ve sloughed off — now my slither is streamlined and my shine is undimmed to where I feel like a whole new reptile! Swaggy venom is coursing through me, my fangs are gleaming, it’s the first day of the rest of my life!”

What we see here is the way a good haircut scrambles the line between physical fact and fantasy. This is not the case with say, feeling good after a manicure, because people generally don’t go into a nail salon with the same hope of metamorphosis — they go because they want a little spiffing up. Whereas haircuts are intimately tied to dreams of radical personal transformation.

Blackbird Spyplane is much too enlightened to rank physical attractiveness, much less on a ten-point scale, but to borrow that language, we’ve all seen 6s transform into 9s thanks to the right haircut. That is why hairstyles are so powerful: We know with our own eyes that they’re capable of making magic come true.

The flipside, though, is that when we invest too much fantastical energy and expectation into a new haircut and it fails to adequately bring our physical reality into alignment with our fantasies, the effect can be deeply depressing.

Pitt flicks by Ron Galella / Getty

You could call this The “Pic of Brad Pitt” Problem. You saw a photo of Brad Pitt on IG, and thought to yourself, His hair looks great. That’s what I want to look like. So you screenshotted it and brought it to an appointment at a barbershop / salon / would-be fantasy portal. If you do this and you are most people, you’ve allowed fantasy to become delusion, and when you inevitably come out of the would-be fantasy portal not looking like Brad Pitt, you might feel worse about yourself than you did going in.

I never did this literally with a pic of Brad Pitt, but in my twenties I absolutely showed up at barbershops with photos of hot dudes with hair I admired … whose hotness and hair connected in no actionable way whatsoever to my own mf gestalt. So I emerged frustrated and bummed.

“I almost never really like a haircut,” Erin told me the other day. “And what I’ve only realized recently is that there’s always been a part of me that thinks I’m going to look different when I come out of a haircut — but what I really want is for my face to look different. So there’s always a letdown, because there’s a gap between this desire for transformation and the reality of your face.”

The remedy for this kind of delusion, to be clear, isn’t to jettison fantasy. Fantasy is another term for imaginative possibility, and a world in which we no longer imagine new possibilities — for the future, for ourselves — is a torched dystopia that we reject.

No! The remedy is to plot the coordinates of your fantasy with a better sensitivity to, and knowledge of, your own mf gestalt. You might fumble, stumble & brick some hairdos along the way. That’s OK if you’re learning from your missteps, rather than repeating them in a state of masochistic denial.

Because what we’re talking about here is exploring and appreciating what is beautiful about you — a process rooted in a desire for a greater sense of joy in your body, and rooted in a spirit of fundamentally loving creativity toward yourself. Like a novelist working on drafts of a book they want to make better, but already know is sick.

For years, Erin brought photos of models to stylists. This was frequently a recipe for disappointment, even if she is far more lovely, radiant & beautiful than any model in any magazine baby! A few haircuts ago, however, she switched it up and brought in a curveball photo of ‘70s-era Tom Petty. The results were promising. Earlier this month, building on that success, she had a eureka moment, went to a new stylist, and brought in a photo of none other than Spyfriend Kim Gordon.

This was still an “aspirational” reference, since Kim Gordon’s swagged-out look is legendarily on Mach 7+. But it wasn’t a delusional reference, because they have broadly similar hair types and face shapes. And since Kim is older than Erin, rather than younger, it gives off zero “thrashing against time / grasping for bygone youth / how do you do fellow kids” vibes. The haircut rocks in a way that feels revelatory.

Which brings us to —

II. Young people can do anything — including have mad stupid hair — and look beautiful. How old is “too old” to take big hairdo swings??

We regard youth generally as a time when it’s acceptable to experiment in all kinds of ways, whereas we regard adulthood as a time to “have your s**t figured out.” We’ve written about this dynamic before, tackling the question of How to Dress Your Age.

To distill it to 2 points that sit in productive tension with each other:

1. It’s tight to keep trying s**t. Turning 35, or 50, or 65 does not cast you into stone. You could call me Alfred, “Swag Lord” Tennyson the way I will tell you, “How dull it is to pause, to make an end / To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!” Shine in use, lovers. These lames can rust unburnish’d all they want. But:

2. If decades into your scientific career you’re still constantly blowing up your lab and injuring yourself, a.k.a. bricking these haircuts and looking bad, you might want to experiment a little less, king!! No shame in picking your battles. However, it can take some lab explosions to learn which battles to pick (Young Spyplane remains a world-class metaphor mixologist), so this does not contradict point 1.

We’ve talked about performing periodic stress tests on your “swag structural integrity” over time when it comes to clothes, and this is very important with hair. You might have locked into a style 20 years ago that suited you then but no longer does. With rare exceptions (e.g. Agnes Varda, and even she did a cool half-grey-half-dyed thing while locking in the cut) some experimentation is not just recommended but crucial. Because otherwise you might stop seeing yourself and coast along blindly on obsolete assumptions about how you look.

A simple example of this with the broskis is your hairline recedes and you don’t adequately re-jigger your cut along with it. You’ve put your s**t on cruise control and taken your hands off the wheel, but then your tires start balding and the vehicle begins to wobble. Time to grab the wheel and course correct, brother.

And we aren’t talking about falling into C.O.M.B.O.V.E.R. Mindset, either — remember that there are ways to look bald & swaggy and that people can see what you’re trying to hide from them!!

Because you gotta keep in mind that —

III. We are unreliable narrators of our own swag

You ever look at someone’s IG grid and they’ve made the same strange face in every single pic they’ve posted going back years? Holding their head at an odd angle and doing a weird smirk they’ve decided is flattering but it looks awkward and unnatural to you, an impartial observer?

We all get ideas stuck in our heads of which parts of ourselves we should downplay and which we should highlight. Sometimes we’re right, but very often we’re wrong, because we are fallible, unreliable narrators of our own swag.

This unreliability underscores the vital importance of friendship and social bonds when it comes to feeling truly cool. Case in point: Erin was recently out to dinner with a girlfriend who’d just gotten a new haircut that day, and the results mortified her. She felt she’d been disfigured… But here’s the twist: Erin thought the haircut was basically the same haircut her friend always gets except subtly but undeniably better. Her friend saw a big, violent change where there was a small, gentle one, and she was blind to its virtues.

Erin told her the s**t looked fire, she elaborated on why she felt this way, and she was not doing empty “yas queen slay” cheerleading. She meant every word.

And so, as inherently swaggy as we may or may not be, our swag will only be stronger when our self-perception incorporates the gaze of good friends we trust who love us.

Still, it bears asking —

IV. What’s dope now?

I don’t really know and, outside of some general anthropological curiosity, I don’t really need to. Not all trends are for me, and that’s definitely true when it comes to haircuts. It’s partially my age, and partially living in the Bay, but my frame of reference for currently “dope” hairstyles derives largely from memes making fun of zoomer-herd-mentality hairdos — Don Draper with the 2022 TikTok bangs, Nolita Dirtbag type accounts making fun of downtown dudes copy-pasting the Paul Mescal mullet, etc…

Left: Bussin’ Gen-Z Don. Right: Schizo Bushwick hair that looked fine on these cute youngsters in A Murder at the End of the World but has no place on the Spyplane Dome

I do agree that longer haircuts are “having a moment” with the boyz in a way that shorter cuts are not. That is interesting to me because, on a binary, shorter haircuts are the ones we tend to deem broadly socially appropriate for the fellas after a certain age, and while I recognize that there are many good reasons for this — hair loss, professional milieus, not wanting to look vain — there’s also something lower-case-c conservative about this attitude that I chafe at.

As with clothes, I definitely want to modulate the way I wear my hair in my 40s vs. the way I wore it in my 20s. But I don’t want to snuff all life out my hair and default to some deadened “age-appropriate” norm. I still wanna convey some personality, some attitude, and a (non-Don-Draper-with-TikTok-hair) sense that I am “still with it.” Rocking my hair a little longer, and a little messier, is one way I like to do this…

This is a perfect place to mention that the pandemic imposed a ~year of hairstyle experimentation on pretty much all of us, when it was effectively impossible to get a haircut during lockdowns. For my part, I’d been keeping my hair on a relatively tight leash throughout my thirties, and in 2020, my s**t ran free.

Looking back, my cabbage was frequently flopping and slopping out of control. And yet there are also pics where I’m like, S**t, I miss it. Particularly when I grew my beard out and pushed my hair back, Sauced-Out Português Fisherman Style, above bottom. This is a look that Erin was never into for reasons that escape me because real talk I was feeling it then and still am today.

Rather than cordon this off as a “past regret,” I have been letting my hair grow longer post-pandemic than I did pre-pandemic, cutting it off in the summer but then letting the leash get much looser in the cooler months.

Maybe one day before too long I will try to grow it back out and return to Português Mode, with the assistance of a baseball cap and a barber who helps shape my s**t along the way. If it wasn’t for the (forced) experiment of 2020, I would not know I had this look in me. In fact, I might have have told you that such a style would “never work” on me!

Karl Ove Knausgård age 43 in 2011, via Wikimedia Commons. David Lynch age 75 doing his daily weather report in 2021. And the writer Rick Vick, age 70, from Nick Broomfield’s Marianne & Leonard documentary.

And yes, there’s a chance I’m simply suffering from an updated version of the Pic of Brad Pitt delusion in thinking I can go so far as to rock, say, the My Struggle Vol. 2 era Karl Ove Knausgård locks (above left), the capacious David Lynch snowdrift (above right), or the flowing gray tresses the late British writer Rick Vick wore into his 70s (above bottom).

But f**k it — that might be a lab explosion I’m willing to risk!

Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.

The B.L.I.S.S. List — a comprehensive index of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples — is here.

Spyfriend Susan Orlean recently wrote a great sletter about accepting her own hair after a life spent tussling with it, here.