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Awful, that I had forgotten all about Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, wife of John F. Kennedy Jr. and killed alongside him in that horrific plane crash. She was thirty-three years old. Also stunning, and a former publicist for Calvin Klein. Now I read that in one of fashion’s weird spirals, she has become, posthumously, a fashion icon.
Especially for The Headband.
Innocuous, tortoise-shell, extra-wide, it slicked back her dark blond hair with panache. Which has left me profoundly in her debt.
I wear them, you see. Not hers, but all sorts, despite (or perhaps because of) my mother’s early disapproval and my friends’ later horror. You try keeping fine, thin hair out of your eyes all day long. As a child I lingered in front of the drugstore headbands, plastic and pastel, the way other kids gazed at candy. For a brief interlude in college, the preppie aesthetic made my headbands okay. Then we all slid away from plaid and pearls, and my bohemian poet friends winced at the sight of me in a childish “Alice band.”
Why they bother people so, I have never known. A firm semicircle that effortlessly holds the hair back—what could be so wrong? I guess they are proof that I have never learned to deftly wield Product or blow-dry my hair into anything but a fright wig. I guess, too, they make me look like I am trying to recapture the kindergarten years.
But Carolyn wore them.
That is, sometimes, all it takes. Women have historically been especially fickle, lifting a forefinger to the cultural breeze before embracing or criticizing. Trained to respect a look that requires, then conceals, significant effort, we learned to mistrust anything that was just plain easy. I remember running into one of my mom’s high school friends while we were shopping. She had an open, friendly face, a comfortably plump figure, and shoulder-length hair held back with—yes. After the encounter, my mother, normally sweet, said something bitchy about her friend having let herself go, the ultimate slap for any woman of her era. She also murmured that middle-aged women should cut their hair short. And that the headband was ridiculous.
I was incredulous. “She looked like fun!” I exclaimed, meaning that she looked like somebody more interested in enjoying life than in primping. I could tell that she did not much care what anyone, including my mom, thought of her. The question is, why do we do this to one another? My mother had thick, curly hair she had always worn short, which worked because she had clear, lovely bone structure. But while she was wonderful about giving me freedom to be entirely myself in every other way, she was adamant that I should “train” my hair. Flat, fine, soft hair is not poodle hair; “training” it is like trying to teach tricks to a bored and sleepy sloth. When I pointed this out, she suggested, bless her heart, a perm. Which turned out so ridiculously frizzy that she accomplished her real goal, which was getting me to chop it all off.
No more excuse for headbands.
She is gone now, though sometimes I run my finger across my many headbands—some polka-dotted, some floral, some velvet—and grin, hoping she is watching. Small revenges are the sweetest.
Friends try gentle coercion, too, exclaiming with pleasure when I show up with a satin-smooth blown-dry cut straight from the stylist, then hiding their cringe when I revert to sponge rollers and headbands. If Samson thought his hair was his power, he should have chatted with a woman. Even now, long past the gossips under the hair bonnets, we are constantly telling one another what to do with the stuff that sprouts from our scalp.
Screw it. The more I read about Bessette-Kennedy—her minimalist look, her hatred of media attention—the better I feel about all headbands. She was photographed many times in hers, which has since been dubbed the CBK. Simple and timeless, it is said.
Timeless indeed. The first headbands were worn around 400 BCE, with vines and flowers woven into wreaths for ancient Greeks and Romans. Gender-neutral, as best I can tell, they celebrated special occasions or athletic victories. Those athletes were men, but in 1914, tennis star Suzanne Lenglen wrapped a strip of fabric around her sweet sweaty head and birthed a trend. Fast forward to the 1980s, when women here paired them with power suits….
Not giving mine up. If I opt for an open-casket viewing, I will leave instructions for a black velvet band to be slid onto my dead head.
This is (obviously!) not about vanity. This is about principle. I do not need to cut my hair because I am past sixty. I do not need to color my hair so I will look younger than sixty. I do not need to renounce my cherished accessories and study up on the art of the coiffure.
Everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
