It's long past midnight in the City of Light, and the subterranean nightclub Le Paris Paris is looking very, well, Le London London. The roving party BoomBox—a sweaty, smoky, sardine-packed exercise in sartorial one-upsmanship and the current toast of British nightlife—is in town for a one-night-only Fashion Week appearance. The place is wall-to-wall angel wings, Day-Glo slogan tees, marionette ruffles, and glittery disco frocks. Makeup is maximal and, uh, vaguely fauvist; hairstyles are best described as conceptual. At the center of it all is one irrepressibly kooky, beautiful girl: It Model Agyness Deyn. Fashion's latest obsession is wearing a let's play naked twister linda evangelista T-shirt. Deyn has a Mickey Mouse mask perched cockeyed atop her head, and her lipstick looks like it might have been mixed by Crayola. But one signature in particular is making this Deyn's moment: her gamine, pearly-blond haircut.In an era in which the existence of the supermodel—those distinct, individual personas who were so much more than beautiful-but-blank canvases—is endlessly debated, a short cut is fast becoming the quickest way for a would-be Deyn to make her mark. Relative unknowns Marta Berzkalna and Sarra Jane leapt onto the fall catwalks with the help of edgy, interesting locks; elfin 19-year-old Cecilia Mendez catapulted herself to unlikely semistardom with a don't-try-this-at-home, Francis of Assisi-esque bowl cut. At Bumble and bumble's salon in NYC's Meatpacking District, stylist Michelle Fiona transformed up-and-comer Barbara Berger's waist-length hair into a "skate flap" (long, sideswept bangs with a razored under-layer, reminiscent of skate rat Tony Hawk circa 1989) at the behest of her Ford agent. "The minute we started undercutting, you saw all her angles—her cheekbones, her jaw," Fiona says. "With some girls, you get that moment of hair shock—`what was I thinking?' But Barbara was just, `Go for it.' "
Where models and nightcrawlers go, designers inevitably follow. In Paris, Lanvin's show saw models sporting deliberately choppy, raven-black wigs looking for all the world like deranged love children of the Cure's Robert Smith and flapper icon Louise Brooks. And when Marc Jacobs' show (never known for its punctu-ality) started an extra hour behind schedule, rumor had it the delay was due to the time it took to dye a smattering of heads siren-red, black, and, most outstandingly, electric blue.
Bolder and braver than we've seen in years, the new look flirts with notions of gender identity and sexuality—two qualities that can be rather fluid in the modeling industry, but that most actresses can't afford to toy with. So, though a handful of starlets have been snipping away (Michelle Williams, for example, lopped off her long waves à la Mia Farrow; R&B diva Rihanna upped her fashion quotient considerably with a razor-sharp bob), hair's new wave is especially refreshing because, unlike most beauty trends in recent years, it's not another Hollywood dissemination.
