Tony Blair must be starting to empathise with Samson this week. Can you imagine being a short-haired former Prime Minister, who on every rare appearance on the Today Programme and Remembrance Sunday has the Twittersphere baying for blood, demanding the police arrest him and send him to The Hague? Then he appears on ITV looking like David Ginola and everyone is tweeting, ‘gosh, look at his hair!’
Though I confess, he doesn’t look too bad, Delilah is still the patron saint of smart men. Should you be considering letting your Covid long locks play out, and avoiding booking a full grooming session at Truefitt & Hill, Trumpers or Pankhurst of London, then have a rethink. Grooming for men has gone through a vast shift since the end of national service. Often offices – especially in the city – required their staff to maintain respectable hair lengths that ultimately reflected what was acceptable in the officers’ mess. While men have been successful over the years sporting long hair, they have never been smart, and I know which of the two is more important.
Richard Branson is perhaps the most successful long-haired silver fox, but his schtick was to be a rogue businessman, who played by different rules and standards. It worked: he is unbearably rich, but no one has ever gone out looking incredibly stylish or smart and said, ‘this is my Branson look’. Anthony Eden on the other hand…
Another long-locked pioneer is Savile Row flagship H. Huntsman owner, and all-round success story, Pierre Lagrange, whose hair has become something of a trademark, which he pairs with equally exuberant (and beautifully made) suits. Again, Pierre’s confidence allows for the norm-breaking to go unnoticed and feel perfectly fitting, but his credo has been ‘disruption with respect’ ever since he took over Huntsman so that all chimes perfectly.
Jimmy Saville had long hair too, but we don’t like him.
Bradley Cooper has made the best attempt at proving me wrong. But what it is about the hugely charismatic and attractive Hollywood leading man with that enviable brown-hair-blue-eyes combo and great dress sense that manages to pull it off, perhaps we will never know.
The matinee-idol hair of Randolph Scott and Cary Grant are perhaps a thing of the past, but the permission granted by lockdown for men to groom more freely and adventurously has not added a clause for long hair when it comes to formality.
The danger of trying to combine sharp dressing with long locks is that the hair proves too much of a distraction: people are talking about Tony Blair’s hair more than the content of the interview, and this is a man who is purposefully outspoken in his pro-consul years. There is something about presentation over content that we cannot resist as a species. Incongruity in places like politics always has rubbed people up the wrong way; just look at Jeremy Corbyn. Outside politics there is more leeway. Let’s hope that Blair’s hair and the pandemic come to be viewed through the same retrospective lens: as a one-off event that nobody is in any rush to relive.
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