Scrunchies went out and in of fashion after their preliminary heyday in the ’80s. In 2003, a “Sex and the City” episode discovered Carrie Bradshaw chastising her novelist boyfriend for describing a classy downtown Manhattan girl as carrying a scrunchie: “No woman who works at W Magazine and lives on Perry Street would be caught dead at a hip downtown restaurant,” she shrieked, “wearing a scrunchie!” Happily, its inventor lived lengthy sufficient to see it triumphantly bounce and flutter proper again into vogue (in addition to into Vogue) in the late 2010s; at the time Revson died, the red-hot fashion label Balenciaga was retailing an “XXL” silk scrunchie on its web site for $275.
But the scrunchie’s legacy stays bifurcated: At some factors in historical past, it has been a fashion assertion, and at others, merely a house consolation merchandise — like a bathrobe or a pair of slippers, to be worn outdoors the home solely so far as the mailbox. Its utility is unflagging, its widespread attraction much less constant.
Our lives are filled with improvements that, for some purpose, actually have it out for our hair — and others we use to defend it. We put on swim caps to defend it from pool chlorine, and slather oil on it to defend it from our blow dryers; a couple of generations again, glamorous ladies tied scarves underneath their chins to defend their coifs whereas they rode in convertibles. Scrunchies, for a lot of, are only one extra manner to make the world somewhat safer for our tresses: Earlier this yr, a Vogue editor wrote in a roundup of staffers’ “can’t-live-without hair products” that, when it’s makeup-removal time at the finish of the workday, she’s “always reaching for a damage-free silk scrunchie from Intimissimi. Crease and frizz, be gone!”
Kim Kimble, a Los Angeles-based hairstylist and the head of the hair division on HBO’s “Euphoria,” wears her hair in braids. So silk scrunchies are a go-to at residence: “They don’t pull or snag” the manner different hair elastics would, she says. “For me, it’s a convenience.”
Kimble, nevertheless, has been styling hair for greater than 30 years, and he or she sees the scrunchie as a press release piece she’d solely ever deploy to instantly evoke the late twentieth century. She’s conscious, definitely, that it’s fashionable as soon as once more. But on “Euphoria,” a present identified for its edgy fashion and its keen awareness of up-to-the-moment beauty trends, she’s solely ever put a scrunchie on-screen as soon as: on the actress Maude Apatow, in a flashback to the Nineteen Nineties.
Ted Gibson, one other L.A.-based hairstylist who has massaged the scalps of individuals like Angelina Jolie, Serena Williams, Priyanka Chopra and Ariana Grande, has been amused (and delighted) to see scrunchies come again as a fashion assertion. Gibson’s niece is a pupil at the Fashion Institute of Technology, he says, “and last year, that’s all she talked about. Scrunchies.”
Gibson has put scrunchies in fashions’ hair for runway exhibits over the years, at New York Fashion Week and elsewhere. Sometimes it’s to add a twig of colour or a coda of sample to the high of an ensemble, and “sometimes because I want there to be a little bit more volume in a bun.”
A bellwether for the latter-day return of scrunchies got here in 2017, so the story goes, once they had been bobbing round on the runway at New York Fashion Week, and by 2019, they had been the runaway trend of the year. That similar yr, Jason Momoa even wore a scrunchie on his wrist that coordinated together with his pink velvet Fendi Oscars tuxedo. (And the writer of this story break up a pair of dual leopard-print velveteen scrunchies along with her then-7-year-old niece, about which each events had been equally stoked.) The following yr, Serena Williams coordinated her on-court outfits at the U.S. Open with the colorful scrunchies in her hair.
Gibson began styling hair 34 years in the past, in the late Eighties — and has seen different accoutrements individuals wore with scrunchies the first time round additionally come again into model. “Fashion and hair kind of dictate each other, and right now, extreme shoulder pads are in. Double-breasted suits. Wide-leg pants.”
In different phrases, maybe the mighty little puff of frothy, tufty pleasure was simply ready for the proper circumstances to materialize. And now, as soon as once more, it’s all over the place. “What I love about the scrunchie is that it has those moments, not only in editorial, but also in movies and on television. It can cross all of those genres of pop culture,” Gibson says. “I think it’s done a great job.”