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Series two of Rivals has brought big, bouncy locks into vogue. From Slash to Grace Jones to Bono’s mullet, here are other looks to copy if you dare …
One thing that has come raging back in vogue upon the release of Rivals, season two, is Jilly Cooper’s hair. That’s no surprise – Rivals has revived a lot of things we thought we’d seen the back of: smoking; dinner parties with an aperitif segment; braces (the trouser variant); a haughty expression. Give it a couple of episodes and we’ll have made our peace with naked tennis in time for Wimbledon.
So, if you’re inspired by a Jilly Cooper blow-dry, here are some other 80s looks to revive …
1. The Bonnie Tyler
Colour-wise, Bonnie Tyler ran the gamut of rock-chick blond, from buttercup to dirty, but it was the defiance of gravity that caught your eye. The top stood up, the rest burst outwards, and the whole thing was incomprehensibly large and buoyant. The overall impression was: “I have only just got out of a bed, not my own, and I’m already all set to make a gigantic amount of noise.”
2. The Diana, Princess of Wales
People called this the “duck’s arse”, which was self-explanatory – a very precise feathering down to the nape of the neck, creating that geometrically perfect dovetail – but what nobody ever explained was why a person might want to do that to their hair. It managed to look simultaneously very princessy, as if the wearer would sulk at the wind if it set a lock out of place, but also quite staid and unsurprising. And that, I suppose, was the point: Diana was a princess and, for the most part, she was not that surprising.
3. The Tina Turner
This hair declined to decide what colour it wanted to be, would not be governed, did not care what you thought and was unreplicable. You could no more walk into a hairdresser, or a wig-a-tier, with a picture of Tina Turner and say, “I want to look like that,” than you could walk into a French circus and say, “I want to eat a car.” Only Tina Turner could make this happen; only Monsieur Mangetout could eat a car.
4. The Jane Fonda
Plenty of people will remember Jane Fonda from the days when she just had “actress hair”, but from 1982 you could never say her name without saying it in full, followed by “workout”. She came at the world with a canon of haircuts, starting with a brunette version of that soft, natural, Jilly Cooper look, cycling through a cute bun and a sleeker, blond air-steward look. But the message never deviated (and was ramparted by the legwarmers): during this epic aerobics session, you will get extremely fit but you will not overheat.
5. The Dolly Parton
After almost 20 years of hair that kept on getting bigger, blonder and bouncier, Dolly Parton stunned the world in 1986 with a shortish, straight mullet, an unbelievable boss move. Nobody could understand it. It was as if Samson himself had cut off his own hair and his power had only grown.
6. The Kylie Minogue
It’s not a straightforward transition from assistant car mechanic in a fictional Australian backwater to club-honey of the world, and Kylie’s perm did a lot of that heavy lifting. The tight bubble curls that screamed “ingenue” inspired a generation of copycat perms.
7. The Grace Jones
From any other artist, the buzzcut on Nightclubbing would have had a certain set of associations, something along the lines of: “Objectify me at your peril, for I am actually part angel, part robot-overlord.” There’s something so assured and ethereal about Jones, though, that this angular hair experimentalism felt more like: “Interpret me at your peril. You’re not ready.” Still not ready.
8. The David Bowie
A contradiction in terms, because there is no the David Bowie, except there is: Labyrinth-era, 1986. There’s a lot of layering and probably a lot of hairspray, and also it is a wig, all driving towards this look that is part firework, part wizard. He looks as if he’s just been electrocuted – because he has, by the intensity of his own vibe.
9. Bono’s mullet
A little bit metrosexual because it was long, but a little bit macho because here was a man doing what he liked with his own damn hair; a little bit brooding because of the romantics and whatnot; a little bit intellectual because it was the talk of Live Aid. Bono’s mullet was the source of embarrassment to him later, he once said. That is crackers.
10. The Nikki Sixx
There was a lot of leeway in glam metal – nobody was asking Mötley Crüe to look mean all the time. Sixx nevertheless had to do something about his ready smile, which he offset with angry hair.
11. The Steven Tyler
Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler was basically doing a Jilly Cooper/Jane Fonda for men, although I don’t think any of us realised that at the time. You know that guy in a meeting who says what a woman just said, but somehow manages to hypnotise everyone so they all forget she said it and think it was his idea? OK, that, made of hair.
12. The Slash
Being as his hair had curls so perfectly formed they could only have been forged by nature, Slash of course wished he had straight hair – which could have been the cussedness for which Guns N’ Roses aren’t unknown, or it could just have been because everyone with curly hair says that, and the rest of us will never know why.
