Messy, With a Twist
Recent updates in the hair department kindle hope for relief, repair, and rejuvenation. Thank goodness, in 2025 short hair is as persuasive as ever, with the bixie cut at the forefront of the choppy movement.
Isabela Merced at the Australian Last of Us (Season 2) Premiere, sporting a bixie cut. For once, appearances are as effortless as they look. Courtesy InStyle. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
There comes a time when one wakes up with an odd strand of hair stuck to one’s upper lip and with bird-like plumage sprouting wildly from the loops of a loosened bun. Usually, this is the time when one has to seriously invest in styling one’s hair to look at least half decent. It’s the time when one can’t stop thinking about getting a haircut. Ironically, it’s also the time when one is showered with compliments on the hard-earned volume and weave. If only these accomplishments didn’t take an entire morning to reap. Frustrated and frankly tired, one begins to look for ways to get one’s hair in order.
Luckily for us modern-day busy bees, tousled looks, messy updos, and edgy haircuts are undeniably in vogue. Androgenous, versatile, and low-maintenance, variations on the layered bob, the gamine cut, the cub cut, the mullet cut, and other relaxingly short coiffures lead the latest trends (Vogue). Whether the end result is more textured, more wavy, more open, or more fringed, the key principles of 2025 hair styling revolve around equal adaptability to all genders, ages, ethnicities, hair densities, face shapes, and yes – financial and time resources.
Today, the most prominent of all haircuts is probably the so-called bixie. A clever compromise between a classical bob and a more radical pixie, the bixie cut enables “easy styling and minimal upkeep while providing a chic, ready-to-wear style that can be tailored to suit your hair type and styling preferences”, writes John Frieda. The bixie is inspired by the 1990s, specifically by celebrities like Halle Berry and Wynona Ryder, whose bright young lustre has been rediscovered by digital natives on TikTok: as PureWow puts it, the bixie’s “become a hit at the salon”.
The bixie cut, as worn by Taylor Hill. Shaggy upper layers build volume at the forehead and temples to complement the rectangular outline of the cheeks and jawline. Available via InStyle. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
Apart from offering enough room for inclusivity and leaving enough room for innovation, the bixie haircut also quenches the more covert thirst for romanticism. Broadly speaking, it’s a hybrid between Yin and Yang attributes – a mixture between a conservative sense of sophistication and post-war tomboyishness. It’s also an experiment on length, definition, and dimension. As such, the bixie cut curtsies in many directions, including the direction of Regency face curls and the 1950s Italian cut. Because it is so diachronically engaging, the bixie has that quality of timelessness which somehow rhymes with universality and inexhaustibility.
The Italian Cut – a hit in the 1950s. Sculptured like the head of a marble bust, the cut presages the outlines of its bixie prodigy. Available via Glamour Daze. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
Yet, the most tempting trait of the bixie cut is its messy intentionality. It turns the belaboured aspect of sprezzatura (the art of concealing art) into a happy coincidence that eventually looks like art. It facilitates messiness, but with a twist for the zestful and the kempt. If an odd strand decides to land on the cheek, the stroke of luck is all the more welcome; if a stubborn spike waves its flag at the back, the cheer of untamed obstinacy is all the more uplifting. The luxury of ‘waking up like this’ is least evasive in these circumstances. All it takes for chaos to be justified is to prearrange the scene of its outbreak.
