Hair Force One

We may not all agree on politics, but one thing that could unite us all? The return of big, Washington hair.

- BY MATTIE KAHN

A few weeks after the presidential inauguration, the chairs at an uptown salon in Manhattan were full, and the mood was as high as a teased updo. It had been like that for the better part of a month, the owner confided. Since the new administration had seized power in Washington, egg prices were up and so were bookings.

These women had seen Carrie Underwood performing “America the Beautiful,” a sheet of golden blond hair draped over her shoulders like a platinum pashmina. These women had seen Karoline Leavitt browbeating the press beneath face-framing corn silk curls. There was Melania Trump, smizing beneath Kate Middleton-style princess waves in her new official White House portrait. Ivanka Trump had worn her hair in an updo to the inaugural balls, but the color was as flaxen as her father’s gilded New York apartment. The women in the salon wanted that hair: gleaming, smooth, and, yes, conservative-coded.

They aren't alone. TikTok teems with tutorials on “Republican hair”—even from those disavowing that partisan affiliation. Newsletters are shilling tips on the literal Trump bump: volume at the roots, with a subtle bend in the middle. This isn't your traditional Washington doyenne's helmet-like bob, à la Callista Gingrich or Katharine Graham, at once sweet, neat, and functional. It's touchable and time-consuming. It flows like disinformation. At the Manhattan salon, the owner has been spinning hot rollers as if Eisenhower were still in the Oval Office. After more than a decade of undone waves and bedhead lobs, the round-brush blowout is as ascendant as a meme stock. In an almost whisper the owner tells me that “even Democrats are doing it.”