Michael Davidow's Blog: The Henry Bell Project - Posts Tagged "mia-farrow"
Cutting it Short
He also stopped by the pool to watch a swimmer take laps, and he stared at her mutely when she surfaced and climbed to the patio. Wet footprints on dry cement that faded to nothing, step by step; and shorn hair like a beaver’s pelt, easy for skimming the water from.
We think of the early seventies as a time when women had long hair. That was certainly the most popular style. But it makes no sense to take that style and apply it across the board, as if every female alive in 1972 would have rushed out to conform (and to look the part). Then, as now, many women would have kept whatever had worked for them in the past (Henry, remembering Paula: “When she ran her hands through her dark bouffant, shiny red stones peeked out like accidental garnet…”). And a few would have struck out on their own. The result being a patchwork quilt at street level: styles from the past thirty years, out and about.
Selma Kahn, of course, both stuck with something she liked, and struck out on her own. And while her immediate inspiration may have been Edie Sedgwick, she probably had Mia Farrow in mind as well; not to mention Twiggy; and not to mention Jean Seberg.
But it didn’t even start with Seberg. Shirley MacLaine claimed the gamine cut for her own, all the way back to fifties, while Leslie Caron and Elizabeth Taylor showed some moxie, too.
This is all to say that my research into the Mad Men phenomenon has disappointed me in at least one respect: that show seems to believe that everyone alive in 1965 (or whenever) automatically wore whatever seemed fashionable in 1965, and you can make people believe it’s 1965, by wearing that stuff.
The styles of SPLIT THIRTY are timeless. They’re also a total mess.
We think of the early seventies as a time when women had long hair. That was certainly the most popular style. But it makes no sense to take that style and apply it across the board, as if every female alive in 1972 would have rushed out to conform (and to look the part). Then, as now, many women would have kept whatever had worked for them in the past (Henry, remembering Paula: “When she ran her hands through her dark bouffant, shiny red stones peeked out like accidental garnet…”). And a few would have struck out on their own. The result being a patchwork quilt at street level: styles from the past thirty years, out and about.
Selma Kahn, of course, both stuck with something she liked, and struck out on her own. And while her immediate inspiration may have been Edie Sedgwick, she probably had Mia Farrow in mind as well; not to mention Twiggy; and not to mention Jean Seberg.
But it didn’t even start with Seberg. Shirley MacLaine claimed the gamine cut for her own, all the way back to fifties, while Leslie Caron and Elizabeth Taylor showed some moxie, too.
This is all to say that my research into the Mad Men phenomenon has disappointed me in at least one respect: that show seems to believe that everyone alive in 1965 (or whenever) automatically wore whatever seemed fashionable in 1965, and you can make people believe it’s 1965, by wearing that stuff.
The styles of SPLIT THIRTY are timeless. They’re also a total mess.
