The first bob that imprinted in my psyche was Audrey Tautou’s cheekbone-grazing brunette French bob in the film Amélie. I was in high school and had just cut my hair into an ill-advised pixie, constantly pawing at the herd of cowlicks on my head that I called a hairstyle at the time. I now had a north star in Tautou’s flippy little coif. That it was French made it all the more appealing—the aughts birthed the indie twee scene and “French girl beauty” as we know it, after all.
Many years later, I came at it from the opposite side. I had just graduated college and wanted to feel confident and grown-up. I got it into my head that the way to do this was to bring a picture of Alexa Chung and her perfectly disheveled, wavy bob to my hairdresser and have him lop off my boob-length hair at the time. And to my horror and delight, he did just that. (The guy I was dating broke up with me mere weeks later. Coincidence?) It didn’t look totally horrible, but it unleashed any chaotic behavior unbeknownst to me when my hair was long and heavy.
Pascal Le Segretain/Getty; James Devaney/Getty
The thing about bobs that no one realizes until their ends are grazing their jawline is that your natural hair texture is free to express itself without the constraints of weight and gravity. And when you have super thick, coarse, and inconsistently wavy hair as mine, it’s going to require a lot of specific styling to make it look so chicly unstyled (not so for Alexa Chung, who’s been very vocal about how fine her hair is). My head became a frizzy triangle. Blowing it out turned it into a newscaster wig, and heat-styling it with a curling iron made it look even more wiggy. I did a lot of strategic styling for about a year, growing it out.
It used to be that snipping some spontaneous bangs over your bathroom sink late at night was the de facto spiral. Now, many of us have come to our senses when tempted to respond to a rough patch with forehead curtains. And yet, we are certainly no less immune to the transformative powers of a haircut. In fact, according to so many dramatic Instagram befores and afters I’ve seen, the bob has effectively become our modern “get my shit together” hairstyle.
“Hair is personal—it’s part of our identity, yet it’s also something we can change relatively easily compared to other aspects of our lives,” therapist Allison Barton says. “When the internal world feels chaotic, people reach for something external they can manage—something that offers structure, identity, and maybe even the illusion of starting fresh.” Unfortunately for me, my life did not magically improve now that my neckline was so elegantly freed from split ends. If anything, I was constricted to a rigid schedule of trims and re-shaping cuts to manage this fickle silhouette. Bobs are not for the lazy, that’s for sure.
Jeff Kravitz/GettyWhat they are very good at is an express transformation in just a few snips, and hairstylist Dhiran Mistry has discharged quite a few of them. “I cut [model] Brooklyn Decker's hair two years ago in Charlotte, and the post went viral,” he tells me over the phone, emphasizing how long her hair was beforehand (waist-length). Decker's choice, however, was completely spontaneous. "She was like, ‘shall we do this?’ And then two hours later we did. She posted the text and there was a timestamp.” Mistry echoes how shorter haircuts on women exude self-confidence, even imparting a sense of vulnerability with the lack of anything to hide behind, so it gives the wearer a sense of authenticity.
In order for a haircut to change your life, it must feel different, not just look different. What better way to feel the weight off your shoulders than to quite literally remove any weight from lounging across your shoulders? While pixies are a drastic commitment to coming to terms with the shape of your head, the bob is more universally adaptable.
This short cut was a revolutionary style in the early 20th century that transgressed gendered norms and implied all sorts of rebellious behavior like promiscuity, drinking, smoking, and generally being a good hang, before it became a norm of its own. Its androgynous shape redefined femininity, revealing a lot of neck in the process. It was chic and modern during a time when hemlines were rising and women’s fashion was slowly becoming less modest. F. Scott Fitzgerald even wrote a popular short story in 1920 called Bernice Bobs Her Hair about weaponizing the haircut.
Maya Dehlin Spach/GettySince then, the bob has gone through many evolutions. The emergence of the pob (named after Victoria Beckham, aka Posh Spice’s chic bob) and the lob (aka long bob, which really just means shoulder length, I think) became symbolic of the Internet’s obsession with “cool girl” beauty in the 2010s (which also relied on some form of subverting the norms of femininity through beauty labor). Every so often a bob emerges to remind us all of how powerful they are. See: Leslie Bibb’s “c*nty little bob” for her uptight White Lotus character. And of course, there's Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, who perhaps is the original representation of a c*nty little bob, and is the blueprint for all sleek, cropped bobs that have come after.
It seems that what bobs and all their iterations stand for is not a rejection of femininity, but instead conventional expectations of it. I think that’s their allure. They’re just cool. “You're stripping back the layers and it's just your face, you know?" Mistry echoes. "It's like, ‘I'm not hiding behind long lengths, and waves, and doing all this stuff to it.'"
I realized much later that it’s not the bob itself I'm after—it' the sense of unencumbered beauty, a minimal shape that feels cool and a bit flirty without the trappings of femininity weighing me down in all those inches. It’s something to remind myself of, the next time I see a celebrity with a totally different hair type than mine on a red carpet, sporting a chic (and professionally styled) bob.
“A new haircut can carry that “reset” energy. It’s not just vanity. It’s an emotional pivot point—a symbol of change, control, or even hope,” Barton says. I can’t help but think of Claire’s despairing asymmetrical bob in Fleabag, to which her hairstylist says, “If you want to change your life, change your life. It’s not going to happen here.”
But I’ll always applaud a dramatic makeover—it takes guts to commit to who you are (or who you want to be). And may we all have a clever companion like Fleabag, who can shift post-bob panic with two words: “It’s French!”
