25 years later, Clueless is remembered and respected for all sorts of things: ambitious fashion, stealth ingenuity, the way Paul Rudd has refused to age even a little since 1995.
But the first time you see him, the first thing you realize about his heroine is his hair. And even now, this remains one of the film’s most defining features.
He’s with us from the foreground of Clueless, the only thing you can tell between Cher walking down a Street from Beverly Hills in his Jeep, before you can see his face or clothes. An excellent curtain marks our elegant advent to it a few seconds later, as you pass it over your face in the foreground.
Straight, thick and bright, it is the ideal shade of golden blonde, with soft reflections that capture light. When he passes his hands through him, the lock falls to a perfectly imperfect place. At that moment, before you know your name, you’ll know precisely who this woman is.
“We’ve all had the experience, at one time or another, of the best woman in school everyone loves,” Nina Paskowitz tells Mashable in Zoom before Clueless’ 25th birthday on July 18. You know, “Great, the leader of everything that’s going on. Everybody loves it. [She’s] maybe a little crazy sometimes, but they appreciate and need to emulate. And yet young, playful, funny, accessible, confused and undeniable at the same time.
“We’ve all had the experience, at one time or another, of the best woman in school everyone loves.”
Paskowitz was Clueless’ hairdresser and therefore guilty of creating the looks that conveyed precisely those qualities in the character. It wasn’t an undeniable task. According to Paskowitz, Cher’s horses tendon had another hairstyle for every look, even if the distinctions were as sophisticated as a new piece. Each of them had to go through the outfit (a more busy outfit can be compensated with more stylized hair, for example) and the outfits, selected through costume designer Mona May and director Amy Heckerling, were occasionally not completed until the last minute.
But make Alicia Silverstone’s naturally gold locks look great? That’s the simple part.
“Because Alicia had such beautiful hair at first, we’re looking to make sure her hair was like silk,” Paskowitz says. All it took to hold it, he explains, was to choose the right shampoos and essential oils, give it normal fillings, avoid poisonous and drying chemicals and apply a curling iron to turn the tips. “Whatever flavor we created, it was her hair that reflected the light, as healthy as possible.”
The styles Cher chooses, or rather that Paskowitz chose for her, have a tendency to be undeniable. It leaves it by default, and when you put it in place, it regularly does so on a basic pony or bun. (Paskowitz’s favorite look? The imitation diamond clip Cher wears during her date with Christian, and which Paskowitz later reused in Amanda Bynes in She’s the Man). do just that. But those same young men could tell you that getting this hair is rarely as undeniable as it seems.
“Most people can’t have that,” says Caroline Mitgang, a hairdresser in Los Angeles. “I can give you instructions on the products you use, how to blow them, brush length, etc. But unless your hair is alone at 90%, it doesn’t happen.”
If you’re already lucky enough to have hair like Cher’s, Mitgang says, replicating Cher’s hair is rarely so difficult: “You’d only use an excellent soft styling product that has a touch of grip, maybe a very soft foam or whatever, take your big 90s circular brush and make it fly with your body. Fixed but without waves, and here we go.” Otherwise, however, there is no darker hair discoloration to Cher’s precise color, and do not brush or iron hair with more texture at this point of softness.
Even if you get close, you may not be able to touch your hair like Cher does, and the ability to touch her hair is a key facet of her appeal. It’s a sensible selection from Paskowitz, which prides itself on creating cellular and naturalistic looks that look stiff and overly stylized. “I looked for her hair and her character to feel like she was passing her hands through her hair without worrying that it seemed inappropriate,” she says. Dear has hair that moves, bounces and moves like her, she can flip over her shoulder to score a phrase or comb her hair to seduce a boy. (“Do I have straight hair?” he wonders when it doesn’t work).
And once you’ve finished playing with it, the hair all the time falls backwards, at all times in place. The express blend of original simplicity and general inaccessibility is exactly what made Cher’s hair so hot in 1995, and what still makes them so enviable all those years later. In our conversation, Paskowitz cited French actress Brigitte Bardot as inspiration, not because their styles were necessarily similar, but because Bardot’s hair, like Cher’s, “was bold, charming and sexy, and had an unashamed style.”
This is what separates Cher from someone like Amber, her rival, who has the same money and prestige as Cher but doesn’t have it, I don’t know what. Amber, Paskowitz says, has a dramatic stripe and more exaggerated and elaborate styles, such as the bristling stripe and the ends turned upwards into the discussion class, or the spiral mats in gym class. Despite their unusual social circle, Amber and Cher’s hair is as different as “good as opposed to evil,” Paskowitz says.
Expensive, by comparison, looks well educated but informal. As we see her shopping, organizing and even associating her outfits through the computer, there is only one scene of her rolled-up hair. The rest of the time, it seems, he just brushes it, and magically falls like this. Cher’s hair is an integral component of our understanding of it. It is the crown of a lucky born person, to which things find it easy, who gets what he needs without having to try too hard for it. Attention included: “When she got down on that quad bike, you looked like everyone was going to catch her, and they did,” Paskowitz says. “All I had to do was turn my head and flow, and an outfit that caught the eye with color and texture … It was unbelievable.”
Or, as Mitgang says, “it looks like your hair has good grades and has the guy you need and you can have it for others as well.” Because one of the reasons Cher’s hair is so horny is that it reflects the attributes that American society has deemed desirable, namely youth, wealth, and whiteness.
Mitgang says he rarely has clients in particular who refer to Cher in those days: “In fact, I’ve spent my whole career doing an edition of this for women who feel they can’t move on to hair paintings that have visual textures.” Cher’s hair is still considered “more professional, cleaner and sharper,” even if it’s an arbitrary preference that reflects and reinforces our culture’s entrenched prejudices against other people who might not have the privilege of having expensive hair – other people of color, for example, or older people.
However, Cher’s express haircut has become elegant over the decades. The simplicity of Cher’s hair gives it a certain timelessness; Paskowitz points out that it doesn’t seem as dazzlingly dated as, say, the wonderful headdresses of the 1980s dynasty. But the last decades of 2000 and 2010 were discarded through large loose waves, Mitgang’s problems, and Cher’s long, straight hair would have been regarded as “a feast to sleep.” Recently, Cher’s hair was back in fashion; it’s less about his express gaze than his discreet approach.
“Most other people can’t have that. Unless your hair is alone at 90%, it doesn’t happen.”
“There’s more than one feeling to let all our hair exist in its herbal form whenever possible,” Mitgang says. “So, by way of laughter, even though at the time her hair embodied this unattainable beauty in the sense that it required very little maintenance, they are better at this time for someone whose hair does just that.”
Cher’s hair still resonates in 2020 is a result that Paskowitz, who fondly remembers filming as a quick, collaborative, low-budget affair, says he may never have predicted it. “At the time, we didn’t know we were creating an iconic movie,” he marvels. “Imagine how proud I am to be here. I mean, really.
But the people in the audience, who felt conquered through Cher the moment she rejected that silky blonde mane? Who was fascinated by how the sun created an airy halo around him and how it floated in the wind? I don’t mean we knew, but we did. We realized, at least, that we would never have that hair. We knew right away that we were going to stop by to pass the house and leave to copy it, that we would never avoid envying the women who had it, that we couldn’t look at it and that we didn’t care.
Birthday so satisfied, released and birthday satisfied, Cher’s hair. You probably wouldn’t have been what made Cher special, but you embodied everything she did.
Clueless is now broadcast on Netflix.