Debbie says:

This poster by Lauren Boyle and Marco Roso went up on Sociological Images (and Jezebel) in November, and Laurie and I never posted on it because of the holidays and various other high-priority posts. The poster was originally published in Dis Magazine with an interesting postmodern essay by Katerina Llanes.

Now I feel like everyone has seen it (there are 92 comments on Sociological Images alone), but I keep thinking about it and wishing we’d talked about it, so here I am.

Of course, it’s a pastiche of the posters you see in every hair salon, showing an equivalent number (or more) of femme-y hairdos, windblown, or curled, or whatever signifies “sexually available to men” in a given period.

Lisa Wade, who wrote the blog post, talks about “aspirational hair,” a phrase which refers to wanting a hairstyle because you want the life that goes with it. She views the poster as being a way for women to aspire to different, less hyperfeminine, choices.

She’s right, of course, but that’s not what caught me about the poster. Living in the Bay Area and working in San Francisco, I look at butch women all the time, but I’m not a fashionista (to say the least) and I don’t notice how hairdos are put together. I literally did not know that I was looking at this much variety. But now that I’ve seen this image and thought about it for a couple of months, I see much, much more variety walking around my life than is pictured here.

A number of the comments say the same thing. Progressive Scholar was first:

“When I went to the salon last week, I pulled this poster up on my phone and pointed to the haircut I wanted. For the first time EVER, I got the haircut I actually wanted.”

So, just by taking the time to put together a poster showing a variety of nontraditional haircuts, Boyle and Roso accomplished two huge things: they made it possible for me to notice something that was before my eyes all the time, but not in an organized way, and they made it possible for Progressive Scholar and many others to have a reference which allows them to ask for what they want. The two also come together quite neatly–using the reference as a way to keep track of what we see is also going to make us better at both imagining and then asking for what we want, whether or not it’s in the actual poster.

The concept expands. Some people can build a matrix of choices in their head from chance encounters and random observations, but most of us are very well served by having variety and choice pointed out to us, whether it’s about hairstyle, or career, or family configuration, or body image, or just about anything else. One thing Boyle and Roso did for me was to remind me of how many things I see every day and don’t know that I see, because I don’t have an organizational framework to hold them.