Dante de Blasio’s towering Afro, a supporting player in his father’s
mayoral campaign, riveted attention once more last week when it caught the eye
of President Obama. Introducing Bill de Blasio at a Democratic fund-raiser in
Midtown, Mr. Obama digressed to point out, “Dante has the same hairdo as I had
in 1978. Although I have to confess my Afro was never that good.”
As
16-year-old Dante implied in an interview with an online local news source,
hair is just hair. “Some people want to take photos and I’m really just happy,”
he said. Others want to reach out and touch it, and some did at last week’s
fund-raiser, their enthusiastic petting prompting the elder de Blasio to joke
that he might have to call security.
The mayoral candidate was doubtless aware that Dante’s outsize hair placed
him in a league with a current generation that has adopted what once was a
badge of revolt as an emblem of style’s cutting edge.
Images like those of Halle Berry’s tightly coiled halo or Nicki Minaj’s
poodly pink Glamfro on the cover of Allure last year have played a part in
resurrecting the hallmark style. Even the customarily conventional Oprah
Winfrey stepped out to front the September issue of O, the Oprah magazine, in a
3.5-pound wig that spanned its cover nearly edge to edge above the cover line:
“Let’s talk about HAIR!”
The style’s current
iteration bears little kinship to the anti-gravity hair flaunted in the late
1960s by Angela Davis, Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver and other icons of the
Black Power movement. “In the ’60s the Afro was looked upon as ‘Wow, you’re
stepping out there, you’re really going against the grain,’ ” said Andre
Walker, the man who fluffed Ms. Winfrey’s wig into its umbrella-size
proportions. In contrast, “When I talk to a lot of the kids from this
generation,” he said, “the whole civil rights movement, it’s very vague to
them. “I don’t think they really know the meaning of how radical an Afro was in
the day,” Mr. Walker added. “It’s a different time now.”
Reluctant to treat her hair with potentially damaging lye, a Brooklyn
resident who identified herself only as Tamar A., declared: “This is just how
my hair grows out of my head. I’m not trying to make a statement. I’m just more
comfortable being who I am.” “I don’t wear my hair natural because I’m strictly
Afrocentric or don’t believe in the white man’s perm,” Sofia Loren Coffee said.
“I wear my hair this way because I truly think I look adorable with natural
hair.”
Though it has become increasingly popular, especially in hipster enclaves
like Brooklyn, the Afro has yet to claim the status of a widespread trend.
At the time of its genesis some 50 years ago the Afro was far from
acceptable. Both white and older black Americans viewed it as a threat to the
prevailing social order.
Willie Morrow, a pioneer of the blowout, as the Afro was known in the ’70s,
and one who popularized the Afro-pick, the oversize comb that many wore like
diadems, recalled, “When you walked down the street it made a firm statement,
much like saggy pants make a statement today. Black parents would say to their
youngsters, ‘Don’t wear that comb; it sends a message.’ ”
Nowadays, though, a
few designers are embracing the style. They include Marc Jacobs, who introduced
sky-high Afros on his runway in 2009, and Rick Owens, who released a parade of
Afro-wreathed models at his show in Paris last week. Mr. Owens said his models
— dancers of varying physical types selected from campuses across the country —
were pointedly rejecting conventional notions of beauty.
“We’re creating our own beauty,”
Mr. Owens said.
No comments:
Post a Comment