October 27, 2026·Aesthetic Study
Hair lines
From towering ship hairstyles to bleached headphones, a history of wearing your identity in your hair.
April Harper Grey is best known as underscores, one of the biggest names in hyperpop, a genre of experimental electronic pop music. The 26-year-old singer and producer released her third album, U, in March, and this fall she's opening for Charli XCX in arenas. You can recognize her by her hair: dark, with the outline of a pair of headphones bleached into it. Her fans are recreating the design on their own heads.
People have worn symbols in their hair to show what they believe in or who they admire for centuries. In 1778, after a French frigate (a warship) fought a British ship, women at the French court in Versailles built model ships into hairstyles up to two feet high.
Since then, people have dyed, shaved, and bleached everything from AIDS ribbons to Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper into their hair.
The pouf, as the towering hairstyle was called, was built up with padding and wire, and it changed with the news. When Louis XVI was inoculated against smallpox, a pouf followed to mark the occasion, with a serpent wound around an olive tree.
The Gauls, ancient peoples who lived in what is now France and nearby regions, were at it long before Versailles. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote that they were "always washing their hair in lime-water" until it "differs in no respect from the mane of horses." Pliny credited them with a soap of animal fat and ash for dyeing hair red. In Kenya, young Maasai warriors braid their long hair with red ochre, a natural pigment, and animal fat. When they become junior elders, their mothers shave it off.
Marcel Duchamp, the artist who had sent a urinal to an art show in 1917, had a star with a comet's tail shaved into the back of his head. His friend, the photographer Man Ray, photographed it. Duchamp called the photo Tonsure, after the patch monks shave on their crowns, and signed it as his own work. Later, he signed a friend's painting as Rrose Sélavy, the female alter ego he'd invented.
Decorating your hair can also be a way to push back against dress codes. NBA player Dennis Rodman expressed himself through his hair. In 1991, with the Detroit Pistons, he had "Trilogy III" shaved into his hair for their run at a third straight championship. They failed to win it. Later came an AIDS awareness ribbon, and in 1998, leopard spots by Chicago nightlife artist JoJo Baby. Figure skating has stricter rules about appearance. One former skater was told her hair had to be cut into a short bob or tied up perfectly, or she'd lose points. When Adam Rippon dyed his hair lavender in 2015, an official asked him to dye it back. Olympian Alysa Liu adds a new ring to her hair every year, like a tree. She won gold in February with three rings. "I just want to be a tree," she said.
In 2019, hairstylist Guido Palau spray-painted leopard spots onto a model's buzz cut for a Versace fashion show. In San Antonio, barber Rob Ferrel has cut The Last Supper into a client's hair. Another client flew in from Washington, D.C., for a Bob Marley portrait, paid $400, and flew home the same day. "I'll see you next month," she told him.
Like Duchamp, underscores goes by a lot of names. She's April in interviews, Milkfish when she DJs, and olivia offseason on her vlog, and she has an anonymous music project her fans still haven't found. "I always just admired people that have a lot of different aliases," she told The FADER, "to make it feel kind of like a secret thing that people are in on." Whichever name she's using, the headphone design stays in her hair. It's the one part of her a fan can copy.
- underscores, April and everyone else
- A warship, two feet up
- The Gauls and their lime-washed manes
- Duchamp's comet haircut
- Rodman's dye jobs, 1991 to 1998
- What figure skating used to allow
- The Last Supper, by appointment
