The Bold Shoulder.(haircut)

Byline: editor: Sarah Brown

The new hair? It's not long, it's not short; it's just right . Haircut pioneer Plum Sykes reports from the cutting edge.

Last week, I did something I said I would never do again: I wore a strapless Alexander McQueen cocktail dress to an awards dinner in London. The dress was chocolate-brown silk velvet, to the knee, with a tiny corseted waist and exaggerated pockets on the hips. About as modern an evening dress as you can get, it had a deliciously sharp silhouette. Admittedly, it did come with a tiny mink jacketini that I started the evening in. But this was quickly shrugged off and abandoned on the back of my chair during dinner, as a newfound wish to reveal my shoulders came upon me. Frequent VOGUE readers will recognize this as a dramatic fashion reversal in the Plum closet: Recently, I have refused to bare more than my wrists when dressing up, and have adhered, over the past year, to dresses for day and night with long sleeves, or bracelet length at the absolute shortest.

The cause of this wardrobe revolution? A haircut. You couldn't have failed to notice the new, swingy, collarbone-grazing, not-long-not-short hair that everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Natalia Vodianova and Kate Moss has adopted. During the writing of this story, hairdresser Harry Josh, of the Serge Normant at John Frieda Salon, barely flinched when Gisele BA1/4ndchen called him in a panic, having taken the scissors to her own iconic locks. "She called me and said, 'Oh, my God! My hair! It's to my shoulders! It's such a shock!'" says Josh, who recently took clients Helena Christensen, Ellen Pompeoand, two weeks after this conversation, Christy Turlingtonshoulder length himself. "My biggest take on why everyone is doing it is that Hollywood had copied girls like Gisele, who had the original chic, long hair. But they turned it into corkscrew-ringlet, extension/curling-iron hair. It lost that essence of what was chic about it in the first placeand that was the carefreeness of it. When your news anchor has that hair, it's no longer happening."

Getting one's hair to this perfect, coolly swingy length is not just a case of a quick chop

To get back to my haircut, it wasn't an instant thing. I was the kind of girl who was defined by her long, straight, elbow-length hair. I wasn't brave enough to lose it all in one go. But two years ago, after I'd had my baby, my long hair had lost its pregnancy gloss. It was so lank it looked like hair curtains. I went to Serge Normant at his salon on Madison Avenue. It wasn't easy getting in with him, as he works in New York only several days each month. He had cut Sarah Jessica Parker's hair to a long shoulder length, and I was inspired by how healthy it looked. He spent two hours snipping the length and splicing the ends, and I left with the jauntiest hair I can remember. A few months later, feeling braver, I had a cut with Ashley Javier, who chopped much more off than Serge. This time, it was more extreme, and showed more of my (very long) neck. It looked wonderful with turtlenecks, but in a dress, I felt rather like an ostrich. I let it grow again, until it was back below my shoulders, and Ashley cut it every few months to that chic shoulder length. He cut Jemma Kidd's hair, Behnaz Sarafpour's, and Saudi fashionista Princess Deena's, too. Instead of "the bob," he calls it "the Ash," which he defines thus: "It's not supposed to be a hair cut, it's supposed to be a hair length. "

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