Big, but still subtle, blow out hair by stylist Sam McKnight at 16Arlington's show at London Fashion Week.
By Katie May Ruscoe
The winds of change started a’blowin with the early 2024 red carpet season. “I Loved These Met Gala Looks But I'm So Over This No-Fuss Hair Trend on the Red Carpet”, decried one article.
From there the shift was subtle but swift: By mid-year, Sabrina Carpenter's bouncy, coquettish blowout was playing a starring role in her album roll-out, and around the same time ‘'heatless curl’ tutorials started popping up everywhere on TikTok.
Sabrina Carpenter, and her hair, at the VMAs, 2024.
As the 2025 trend predictions started rolling in, there was one in particular that was omnipresent, and by the time Zendaya stepped onto the Golden Globes red carpet with a voluminous Old Hollywood bob it was official: whether it’s 90s supermodel-esque or fluffy, 1980s ‘Sloane Ranger’ – big, blown out hair is back, baby.
Zendaya at the Golden Globes in January, with a bouncy, old Hollywood bob.
Just as activewear and sensible shoes came to define our wardrobes (and the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic’, our beauty cabinets), post-pandemic hair trends have leaned heavily toward the unfussy and low maintenance – think a middle part with a casual wave, many iterations of a blunt, lived-in bob, and, more recently, the slick-back bun.
We’ve seen a remarkably long run of easy-breezy vibes. It was only a matter of time before the pendulum swung wildly the other way.
As always with shifts in the style zeitgeist, this one hasn’t simply come into vogue ‘just because’. There are a number of sociological, cultural and political factors putting the air into the nouveau bouffant.
For starters, country music is very much having a moment in the mainstream sun (hello Cowboy Carter), so naturally an interest in ‘bigger than Texas’ hair should follow suit.
Bosses demanding that we all get our asses back to the office has seen rise to corporate glam in general (refer to ‘Office Siren’ and the threatened return of ‘Millennial Business Casual Clubwear’).
Big, bouncy hair has also previously been posited as a sort of hyper-optimistic shield during times of economic turmoil.
Cindy Crawford’s iconic early-90s blowout is a key reference point for today’s va-va-voom hair, and it’s surely not a coincidence that we find ourselves revisiting this look during one of the worst economic downturns since that period.
Big 90s hair queen.
The return of big hair has also been linked to the return of the Republican party to power in the US, and all the retrograde, greed-is-good, techno-authoritarianism vibes that they rode in on.
The Guardian alludes to Trad-Wife-coded “overt femininity”, while trend forecaster Sean Monahan coined the “Boom Boom aesthetic” to describe the appeal of an “80s archival look” that unashamedly fetishes the hyperindividualism and excess of the era.
The big blowout look, from today: reality star and viral podcaster Gabby Windey for The Cut, with hair by Ricky Mota.
Scratch the surface of cultural touch points over the last year and you’ll start seeing the latter everywhere, from fashion to music, TV to drinking and dining.
See, the much-hyped New Balance 1906L loafers and the influencer-favourite chunky gold stud earring, the swoony synths of Chappell Roan’s Good Luck Babe, the adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s late-80s Bonkbuster classic Rivals, all those dark panelled eateries, the popularity of the martini and the mainstreaming of cocaine.
The 80s called... Jilly Cooper's 1988 book Rivals was recently adapted into a very horny series.
There have been plenty of 80s beauty leanings too: an embrace of blush, and the pointedly primped and perfected bombshell blowout overtaking the laid back beachy waves of recent years.
Every generation is guilty of looking back with rose tinted glasses on an era they were not alive to see, and, as Monahan explains, for Gen Z it seems the pull of 80s excess is too alluring to ignore:
“The 80s archival look that defines the boom boom aesthetic is certainly maximalist in its appetites. Its work hard, play hard ethos presumes an abundance agenda i.e. the money earned working funds consumption while playing.
"After a decade of executives dressing like interns (normcore), touting anti-growth platitudes (degrowth), while smartphones enabled the total dissolution of work/life boundaries (email jobs), is it any wonder the youth find inspiration in the glamour of the past?”
Everything is bigger in Texas: Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter era hair.
Basically we’ve skidded on past ‘quiet luxury’ and have now entered our all-out ‘f**k it’, nakedly ambitious, more-is-more era.
If you look past the meta-political associations, the comeback of the hyper-blowout can be seen in a lighter, not that srs view – the inevitable return of an aesthetic that counters another aesthetic that we’ve all just gotten a bit bored of.
Where the minimalist ‘clean girl’ look was about purity, quietude and practiced effortlessness (not without its own problematic associations, tbh), big hair, and the wider maximalist trend it sits within, invites you to take up space – to express yourself and move through the world with a bit of playfulness and drama.
In a time when it feels like we’re all just kind of screaming into the void perhaps we just want our hair to do a bit of the shouting for us?
BIG HAIR, BIG ENERGY
PROTECT YOUR BLOWOUT
TAKE IT SKY HIGH
THE TOOLS TO HELP YOU GET HIGHER
