CNN
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“They wanted me to grow my hair really long,” the late Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor told Oprah Winfrey in 2014, “and wear miniskirts and all that sort of stuff because (record executives) reckoned I’d look much prettier. So I went straight round to the barber and shaved the remaining of my hair off.”

O’Connor, who died on the age of 56 on Wednesday July 26, first debuted her buzzcut in 1987 when she was just 20 years old — two years after she signed her record deal. It was an act of defiance, a refusal that her appearance and femininity be commodified by the music industry. O’Connor’s baldness quickly became a cornerstone of her public image, and a visible shorthand for her rebellious disposition.

Today, the hair style is more commonplace. London-based youth culture magazine Dazed dubbed it the hair cut of 2020 after coronavirus lockdown restrictions within the UK result in a surge in clipper-only crops. Celebrities akin to Florence Pugh, Kristin Stewart, Amber Rose, Iris Law, Willow Smith and Saweetie have worn their buzz cuts with pride. Regardless that the style has entered the mainstream, a sense of freedom still permeates its female wearers. In 2017 after shaving her head, actor Kate Hudson told Harper’s Bazaar she was surprised how much she warmed to the change. “The connection to (my hair) was powerful and I wasn’t prepared for that. It’s so liberating.”

However the shorn head has a sophisticated and contradictory history that has led to it becoming an emblem of non-conformism — particularly for girls.

In ancient cultures, before the mass production of hygiene products and proper plumbing systems, closely cropped hair protected communities from the spreading of head lice. Priests and priestesses in ancient Egypt were well-known to shave their entire body to advertise cleanliness. Soldiers of the Roman Empire also had short hair, unlike the Vikings of Scandinavia or Celtic fighters known for his or her typically long locks.

Buzzcuts were one in all the earliest examples of form over function, not less than in the sweetness space. Within the Fifties, the US military implemented shorn hair as a standardized haircut for men. Women could be buzzed too, in the event that they didn’t fall consistent with up-dos akin to ponytail and buns. Identity and self expression through outward appearance was actively discouraged, and nobody was protected from the enforced uniformity. In 1957, Elvis Presley was drafted into the US army and sent to the military barbers at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. In accordance with a Washington Post article from that very same yr, Presley watched his hair fall to the ground and quipped, “hair today, gone tomorrow.” The “jarhead” haircut — where hair is cut very tight to the skin leaving an island of roughly half an inch of length on top — continues to be popular within the US marines today.

On this context, bald heads signified homogeneity, utility and conformism.

Women and buzzcuts

Women, nevertheless, have long been shaving their heads to indicate solidarity with social injustice. Within the 18th century, after the French revolution, some women chopped their hair off as an indication of respect to the chums who died on the guillotine. It was called hair “a la victimé,” because a guillotine death sentence required unexpectedly cut hair to assist the efficiency of the blade.

Even today, a female with a shaved head is a robust symbol of protest. Britney Spears was penalized for paparazzi photographs showing her shearing off her long hair in 2007. “Bald and Broken” read the headlines that followed. It was considered a type of self flagellation — dismantling one’s beauty and social currency so publicly. The photographs were utilized by some as robust evidence of Spears’ declining mental health. But 16 years later through the Free Britney protests in 2021, fans and supporters buzzed their hair outside the courtrooms deliberating over Spears’ conservatorship.

In 2022, through the Iranian protests that followed the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, Iranian women everywhere in the world began cutting their hair (an indication of beauty the Islamic Republic orders is hidden) on the street during demonstrations, filming the act and posting it online. “We wish to indicate them that we don’t care about their standards, their definition of beauty or what they think that we should always seem like,” 36-year-old Faezeh Afshan told CNN on the time. “It’s to indicate that we’re indignant.”

But it surely wasn’t until the Eighties that the feminine buzzcut was given a world platform, when the look was adopted by the likes of Grace Jones, Annie Lennox and O’Connor herself.

In her memoir, Jones wrote that her baldness “made me look more abstract, less tied to a selected race or tribe.” With O’Connor, shaving her head similarly allowed her to exist outside of a prescribed box. “I wasn’t going to have any man telling me what to do,” she said in a 2022 interview, “or who to be.”