Why in the world do we care so much about Ivanka's hair?

In 1995 the then US first lady, Hillary Clinton, famously quipped, “If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle”. It’s advice that the current ''first daughter'' has taken to heart. The snipping of Ivanka Trump’s locks was a major news story last week.



According to The New Daily, online stories about Ivanka’s new do reached an audience of more than 1.4 billion people, which was the equivalent of $36 million in online news publicity. If correct, that’s one in seven people on planet Earth who read about a woman trimming a few centimetres off the bottom of her hair.

My Google search on “Ivanka Trump haircut” turned up 11.9 million results. It’s not as if Ivanka found a cure for cancer or solved our climate crisis; we’re talking about a haircut, people! Something that most of us do numerous times every year.

We might like to dismiss the fascination with hair as another quirk of our US cousins, but we’re just as interested in the follicular foibles of women in public life here in Australia.

Take Julia Gillard. Critiques of Australia’s first female prime minister’s hair tone and texture were constantly interwoven with reporting about her policies and activities, which served as a constant reminder of her gender. Julia Gillard may have been meeting world leaders or discussing troop movements in foreign territories but that didn’t stop her from being judged on her locks.
But for now, it seems, the concern with the hair styling of people in public life has jumped the gender divide. Common wisdom used to be that men just had to have a full head of hair to hold power. Now, their hair is becoming a target for commentary too.

Donald Trump’s unruly bouffant has become a meme in its own right, both mocked by his enemies and celebrated by his supporters. Just as the Nike logo that is so ubiquitous the company can drop its name and use only the Swoosh, Trump’s whole persona can be conveyed by the silhouette of his hair.

As Trump biographer Gwenda Blair has noted, Trump’s hair is “a highly effective trademark, a humanising bit of vanity that made him the people’s billionaire, rather than a remote tycoon, and on the campaign trail, his coiffure made him the perpetual centre of attention.”
Similarly, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s unkempt hair is a fundamental part of his anti-establishment persona. He’s so "anti-elite" he doesn’t even brush his hair. He’s the bulldog who’s showing the Eurocrats the non-conformist stuff of which Brits are made.

The irony of Trump and Johnson “keeping it real” with their unorthodox grooming is that both are obscenely privileged men whose inherited wealth means that they have the luxury of not adhering to standard grooming practices and getting a pass because of the status their wealth confers. But is the focus on men’s hair actually a gender leveller – a sign that male and female politicians are being held to the same superficial standards?
I doubt it.

Both Trump and Johnson could easily change their hair and redirect the attention it brings. If they wanted the world to focus on their words and deeds rather than their unruly locks, they can simply get a haircut and the conversation is over.

Women, by contrast, do not have the luxury of choosing whether or not to draw attention to their appearance. At this point in history we seem incapable of separating a woman’s work from her appearance, no matter how conventional looking she strives to be.

It’s understandable, then, that women like Hillary Clinton and Ivanka Trump use our obsession with how they look to their advantage. It’s a way to claw back as much control as they can over the inevitable media scrutiny and public interest.
What is less understandable is why we are all so interested in the first place.

Perhaps we focus on the simplicity and mindlessness of hair in an attempt to distract ourselves from the array of problems our world faces, from sabre-rattling at Iran to looming environmental collapse. The tragedy is, the big issues are unlikely to be solved when our attention can be diverted so easily by a new hairstyle on someone who until her father was elected President rated barely a blip on the global radar at all.

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