Punk polish; An original and surprising beauty gets a bold new look.

Byline: Sally Singer

I don't want to cut a haircut that's a hat," says Garren, flipping through pictures of skinny young dudes with shaggy, spiky, asymmetrical bottle-black dos at underground dance nights in Manhattan. "I want it to be her hair but modern, rock, club." Her being Selma Blair, that is. Blair's hair is thick, straight, ebony; and were she to need a bra, it would fall to the bra line: She is the most gamin gamine you could wish to meet and, in the assessment of all concerned, the perfect woman to take the hippest boys' street haircut in New York and make it chic, grown-up, and pour elle. She already owns the perfect wardrobe of Margiela, Demeulemeester, and "Dior Homme, the smallest size. Little Ashley Olsen has the smallest leather jacket. She let me in on the secret." She adds, "If I wear a black T-shirt and old Fogal tights, I have an outfit."

Blair, who has just divorced her husband of two years, Ahmet Zappa, is game for a change: "I've always been a cutter and grower," she observes as Garren and his assistants ready themselves for the great intervention. (Garren himself is changing: His breathtaking new salon opened this past December at the Sherry-Netherland hotel.) It's this adventurousness that has led Blair to indie stardom-from her work with Todd Solondz to the Hellboy cult to her forthcoming starring role in Ed Burns's Purple Violets-and style iconicity. In her eight years in Hollywood, she's never joined the ranks of the ponytailed, Balenciaga-big-bagged, latte-toting babes. "It's easy for actresses to lose themselves in what a pretty girl should be," she reflects. "I'm never going to look like that, so I just gave up. I've tried my whole life to look credible. But if a look doesn't suit you, you have to prove yourself credible in another way."

But it's not so easy to figure out the alternative. Garren reckons that Blair should steer clear of the shagginess of an Iggy Pop while embracing the lopsidedness and spikiness and general eighties-ness favored by the androgynous males who frequent MisShapes, the popular Saturday-night party at Don Hill's, in SoHo-a club made cultural phenomenon largely by the swooping cuts of its deejays and followers. ("I appeal to punk-scene boys," Blair remarks, "the guys with the piercings and the earrings. It's fine if they look like that, but I do like the smell of soap.") "When I pulled up her hair," Garren meanwhile elaborates, "I realized that to leave any hair on her neck makes her really common." Blair is anything but common, so the decision is made to go shorter still and reveal the whole neck and caboodle, with Mohawk back, shaved sides, and a quiff that sweeps dramatically over one eye. In Garren's

hands, Blair will not emerge ...