Business in the front, party in the back

Of course, you can pull off sporting bad hair if you are otherwise excessively stylish or already a movie star. (If you are rich, bien sur, you can get away with anything, which is why so many fashion faux pas begin with the famous.) But only the superstylish feel compelled to actually get an ugly haircut, anyway: Having done it all, seen it all, tried it all, what's left except the fashion mistake? It's the only way to stand out in a crowd of nice safe bobs and Caesar cuts, much like you'd wear the distressed Gaultier motorcycle jacket because it's more noticeable than that prim Prada ensemble. As Brian puts it, "'Cool' hair is hair that is different, hair that stands out. I may not like the style, but as long as someone is making an effort to be an individual, I think it's cool."

The most striking thing about the sudden explosion of bad-hair-as-good-hair is that it is a kind of anti-retro movement, as if the trendsetters of the world woke up one day to discover that there were no truly new haircuts to try, and so traipsed back to revive the most obvious offenders from the past. Much like the recycling of vintage clothes -- fashion errors of past decades returning to the runways while the painful memories are still fresh (read: leg warmers, bell-bottoms, shoulder pads, camouflage prints) -- egregious period hairstyles are also making comebacks.

Unlike vintage fashion, however, retro hair has less to do with stylistic nostalgia and more to do with a whimsical sense of irony: recycling the most hideous cuts worn by the least glamorous suburbanites from our most unattractive decades -- how witty! What's more ironic than a $300 '80s-revival white trash haircut worn by a model who is paid $2,000 an hour to look modern and beautiful? (The most fashionable rich know that they shouldn't actually look rich; nothing is more gauche!)

Versace, for example, last year revived the '70s Miami society wife look, caking Amber Valetta in pale blue eye shadow and teasing her stiff, blond hair into a fluffy blowout of extravagant heights. The Farrah Fawcett feathered do, another painful look from the same era, has also reappeared among the more fashionable fashion icons: No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani, whose shocking-pink feathered hair earned her a coveted Vogue/VH1 fashion award, and Drew Barrymore, whose peroxided feathers in "Charlie's Angels" were an ironic nod to her glamorous namesake. It's just a matter of time before Chloë Sevigny shows up in a Mohawk, which, thanks to the punk rerevival, got its very own eight-page fashion spread in the March Vogue. (We are, after all, entering a recession, and glue is much friendlier to a pinched pocketbook than Kiehls Silk Groom.)

Similarly, the Afro, originally revived by hip-hop kids seeking insta-old-school soul, is now creeping into more traditional style circles, popping up on actors and models mimicking Lauryn Hill's crooning cool. And just when you thought crimped hair had mercifully disappeared sometime during the mid-'80s when the high schoolers finally shorted out their crimping irons, it's making a comeback in Hollywood as the frizzy geometric locks burn up the red carpets. Remember the brief phenomenon of hair mascara, those quintessential '80s hair paints that let you streak your do with crusty neon hues? Brought back by Christian Dior more than a decade later, sold out at makeup counters all across the country and then gone yet again as quickly as it arrived.

With the media machine force-feeding the world ever faster images of beauty and cool, it's no wonder that the most forward-thinking individualists would want to rebel. Hair is, after all, the ultimate identifier: You can wear the most mundane pair of jeans and a plain white T-shirt, but your haircut will expose what you really think about yourself: the military buzz cut, the sideburns, the dreadlocks, the preppy bob, the long girlie locks, the punky purple rat's nest. We are what we choose to hack off our heads.

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