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“Natalie Imbruglia is the reason I started doing hair, from her Torn music video,” Jen Atkin told me last year. “When I was in high school, that video came out and I loved her short, choppy, razor bob, which I pray everyone starts doing again. And that’s why I started cutting my own hair because of that video. So you have Natalie Imbruglia to thank.” It seems Irina Shayk also has Natalie Imbruglia to thank for her hair. Kind of.
Fronting Numéro Magazine’s anniversary cover with a short, sharp, spikey shag – Irina looks uncannily similar to the Australian singer in her iconic 1997 music video clip for ‘Torn’ (she’s even got the same baby blues and pillow lips).
But long before Irina was fronting Peter Lindbergh’s lens in an Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent bodysuit-ball-gown-hybrid (see below), baby Nat was “lying naked on the floor” with a big, bouncy shag.
Unlike Imbruglia’s cut – which had a little more poof at the root and that kind of 90s ‘Rachel’ swing to it – Shayk’s shag is more textural and choppy, like a chic helmet head, perfectly bitsy and slightly wet in finish.
Styled by French hairstylist Taan Doan – the cut is a very different look to her typical bombshell lengths. Even her recent bob – which she debuted on the arm of Bradley Cooper at the Golden Globes – has not yet risen to such heights, with this look particularly cropped all over, almost like an elevated pixie.
Doan even cut a kind of asymmetrical fringe, which was razored-out fitfully but which climbs up on a steep diagonal, culminating in cool little perky tuffs. The hairstyle taps into a broader 90s zeitgeist of Super shags – where Helena, Linda, Christy, even Kate – all touted short, shaggy styles in the decade past. It also continues to compound the ‘short hair is sexy’ rhetoric which was put to bed in the decade following with extensions and exaggerated lengths reigning supreme in the 00s.
While Shayk’s shag will most definitely be a wig, it’s a wonderful, perfectly executed one at that. It’s also reignited a love for Imbruglia’s 90s look. A hairstyle to bookmark if you’re feeling brave – or nostalgic – we’re not torn on this.
