Hold Steady

Long considered an ’80s relic, hair gel is mounting a comeback. Former music reporter Jancee Dunn reflects on the sticky styling aid’s rock-star heyday—and its refreshingly wearable second act. 

- Jancee Dunn

As I live-streamed Hood By Air’s spring show in my Brooklyn apartment back in September, I found myself frozen in astonishment by the time the third or fourth look hit the runway. It wasn’t Shayne Oliver’s gleefully subversive Hustler-logo polo shirts that caused me to gape, nor was it his mutant double-facing cowboy boots.

What sent me to a paralytic place was the substance that was slathered on models’ heads and that dripped onto their foreheads. The years spun away. Suddenly I was transported to the eighties—to my teenage bathroom in New Jersey, where I regularly preened for suburban basement parties with a hefty bottle of candy-colored L.A. Looks in hand. How else could I maintain my signature towering coif, which would have humbled a courtier at Versailles? Standing in front of the mirror, my boom box blasting a Siouxsie and the Banshees cassette, I would glop on that tropical-scented hair gel until my light-brown strands were the height and texture of a box hedge.

I assumed that gel had gone the way of my frankie says relax T-shirt. Yet there it was, creating a pervasive slick across the spring runways—sexy and sea-soaked at Altuzarra, adding a sultry gleam to Simone Rocha’s plaits and wet bangs, shined to a neon-tinted mirror finish at Paco Rabanne.

“Oh, it’s definitely back,” confirmed Amy Farid, the hairstylist behind Hood By Air’s mischievous styles. “People are relearning gel.”