Fox Chapel High 1987

Isn’t it funny how the thing that is most fashionable at the time can seem the most ridiculous a few years later? Although I prefer style (it’s cheaper), I have nothing against fashion because it’s the principle way that ideas are popularized these days. So what’s the concept behind this look? Bigger is better is what springs to mind, and it’s actually not as flip an idea as it sounds. After all that was one of the guiding principles of the Reagan years – big business, big military, big brother – even government, which he famously derided, quickly became bigger than ever under his guidance. The thing about fashion is that whatever is fashionable inevitably becomes un-fashionable, even if that thing is cool. Look at the Rolling Stones, the eternally greatest Rock and Roll band who are soooo out now for having the temerity to grow old and remind the boomers they’re growing old too – at least half the Beatles had the grace to die young where they can remain comfortably in nostalgia. The first thing I see when I look at this picture is artificiality – like Reagan, the hippie arch-nemesis, you can see this do as a reaction against the fashions and hence the ideas of the sixties, a time when a whole lot of new concepts that were bubbling at the avant garde margins finally broke into the mainstream. The naturalism and "authenticity" so prized by the age of Aquarius, which expressed itself in long, straight hair and very little make up has found it’s opposite here. Of course that look was itself a reaction against the made up artificiality of the fifties and here the cycle has recycled back to the bouffant. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with artificiality – after all it’s the guiding impulse of my beloved decadence, and self-aware artists like Roxy Music and David Bowie were able to do great things with it – but the results in suburban hair styles were not so good.