1960s short hairstyles: 7 bold looks that defined the decade’s most revolutionary era in hair

Short hair had a moment in the 1960s unlike anything before or since. Women who had spent the postwar years sitting under salon dryers, rollers pinned tight, waiting for their curls to set, started cutting it all off — and the results looked nothing like the neat, sprayed confections of the 1950s. The new short haircuts were clean, fast and, in many cases, deliberately modern in a way that felt almost like a provocation.

The shift had a few different starting points, but London was at the center of most of them. Vidal Sassoon, working out of his Bond Street salon, had been developing geometric cuts since the early 1960s, inspired in part by Bauhaus architecture. His collaboration with designer Mary Quant — whose miniskirts were redefining women’s fashion at the same moment — produced what the British press quickly called “the Sassoon bob.”

Short-cropped in the back, longer at the sides, with hair falling forward at the cheeks, it was built for movement. By 1964, the style had appeared in both British Vogue and French Elle. Quant herself later said that Sassoon “freed us as much as the Pill and mini-skirts.”

What made Sassoon’s cuts genuinely new was the philosophy behind them. He wanted to “eliminate the superfluous and get down to the basic angles of cut and shape,” as he put it. The result was wash-and-wear hair at a time when women were returning to work in large numbers and had neither the time nor the patience for lengthy salon appointments.

His five-point cut — an asymmetrical bowl cut with sharp geometric angles, worn most famously by model Peggy Moffitt — became one of the decade’s defining looks. His most publicized moment came in 1967, when he cut Mia Farrow’s hair on the set of Rosemary’s Baby in front of 40 fashion editors, 110 photographers and five television crews. The short, almost boyish result landed on front pages everywhere.

While Sassoon’s geometric precision was shaping one wing of the short-hair movement, American women were still working out what to do with the bouffant. The teased, voluminous silhouette that had defined the early 1960s didn’t disappear overnight.

Jackie Kennedy wore a refined version of it throughout much of the decade, and hairstylists at mainstream women’s magazines — like the famous Kenneth, who did Kennedy’s hair and worked with Woman’s Day and other publications — were producing softer short styles that split the difference between the old glamour and the new informality. Sidesweeps, cloche shapes and loose bouffants with tight-set curls all remained popular well into the late 1960s, particularly outside major fashion centers.

By the middle of the decade, the mod movement had brought another short-hair option into the picture. Twiggy, the British model who became a sensation in the US after her 1967 American tour, wore a cropped pixie cut with an androgynous quality that contrasted sharply with the softer, feminized short styles. Her look — ultra-short, straight, with heavily lined eyes — made the pixie feel like a statement rather than just a convenient cut. The “Moppet,” a sleekly brushed-down version of the same basic shape, appeared in American fashion coverage that year as a mod alternative to the curlier bouffant styles.

The decade ended with short hair pulling in two directions. The precision cuts and cropped pixies of mid-decade mod style were giving way, for many women, to longer, freer hair associated with the counterculture. But the short-hair vocabulary that Sassoon and others had built didn’t disappear — it became the foundation for the wash-and-go cuts of the 1970s, and the five-point cut and geometric bob kept turning up in fashion editorials for decades after.

The photos collected here include hairstyle spreads from 1967 published in Woman’s Day, featuring seven looks designed by Kenneth, with the range of short styles that were considered fashionable that year — from curly bouffants to sleek sidesweeps to the mod Moppet.