Remnants
an ongoing anthology of hair aftermath
This week fell like an anvil.
Gorgeous weather swept into Baltimore and the school year is winding down. Every student needed seven extra days to tell me they didn’t understand the assignment and I get it. My brain was on fire yesterday and I could only think in images, so this is a late missive. And short !
My brother is in town visiting and yesterday he told me about growing his hair out long. He has dark, thick hair like mine and (also like mine) it grows into healthy stubble on his face and thick at his eyebrows. He looks great. Currently sporting a mustache like our dad did before he betrayed us all by shaving it.
So my brother has been on a journey with his hair. He was living in Hawaii for many months and while there, he grew his hair out long, longer than he ever had before. He tried growing a beard also. He reflected on how it felt to have longer hair, what it made him think about himself, how others might view him. He felt he started to look like other guys on the island where he lived, like he was morphing into a sort of type, and ultimately decided that more clean shaven felt like himself. (Clean? Shaven? more on that later).
Changing seasons is a great time for a hair journey, or a ritual shearing.
Where is your hair showing up for you this week?
Where have you found it lately? What shape, line or form does it take? Is it thick, wiry, curly, slim, wispy? Does it catch the light? Do you hasten to sweep away the evidence? This week we’re thinking about remnants, where hair goes immediately after it comes off the body.
I’ve followed the writer Harling Ross Anton since she was a fashion editor at the now-defunct Man Repeller. I enjoy how she makes dressing feel manageable and approachable through unexpected styling and funky silhouettes. She made me believe in tiny sunglasses.
In her post “Styling Shorts: 2 Simple But Effective Outfit Templates” on her newly minted substack ((👋 Gumshoe)), she opened with the following:
“This morning I asked Siri to remind me to schedule an appointment for a leg wax. Shorts season is upon us!”
Hair moments are everywhere. Especially as we wiggle out of our dark winter holes and come sneezing out into the sunshine. Do you have hair rituals that mark the changing of the seasons?
I think I may try a leg wax this year. I’ve never done it but it seems like it would be cathartic—I can feel the sound.
Looking over the drawings I’m sharing this week, for whatever reason they just feel super gay to me. So I hope you enjoy these gay drawings.
I showed one or two of them to friends to make sure they didn’t seem like “Rugrats" fan art, and while no one could really confirm that they didn’t, what I found most interesting was that everyone had a different name for the hairs left behind. For some they were “yeah, pubes” or “oh, clippings” for others they were “shower hair!'“ or “I just plucked my eyebrows too.”
But friends, I never said those were eyebrow hairs..
This is an ongoing exploration of where I leave my hair,
xoxo