Big Hair Is Back

Sarah Palin and Robert Pattinson: What do they have in common, besides the letter P? Hair. Lots of gorgeous, flowing hair, styled to perfection, writes Vanessa Friedman in the Financial Times. Big hair is making a big comeback, she says. Usually, short skirts and tall hair are signs of economic boom times, as so gloriously evident in the 1980s. It could be that this holiday season will mark an economic recovery, Friedman writes, or maybe we’ll feel nostalgia for those easier times. But this era's big hair is different from the styles of shoulder-pad times—this hair moves. It's seductive. It's subversively touchable. It advertises a "Samsonian symbolism" that says, "I can grow this—imagine what else I can do." And yet, Palin and Pattinson don't hide all the work that goes into their manes' artistic swoops and flips. It "speaks to our current desire for transparency, fiscal and otherwise."