Hot Fuzz.

Byline: Photographed by Craig McDean.

For years we've been straightening unwanted frizz into submission. But, as Sally Singer discovers, the messy mane is making a comeback.

It's a rainy spring New York day, one most people believe is all about the G-20 summit and the resolution of global crises. I, however, am thinking about the globalization of my hairi.e., frizz. Rain will do this to a woman given to ringlets and the shrink factor. So it's into Whittemore House, a West Village salon whose preopening is so low-key that you can enter the establishment only through a construction area. Here, in the basement of an enormous former mansion built in the 1830s, Michelle Fiona flies in every six weeks from San Francisco to tend to the locks of Amanda Peet, Zooey Deschanel, Karen Elson, and their silkily tousled ilk. She sprays Oribe Volumista onto my washed hair and starts going at it with a big round brush. "You have to change your haircut for the season," Fiona says. "It should be weightier in summer, or it will be a breeding ground for frizz." Then she says something that's practically revolutionary: "You can't ever completely battle the frizz. You should embrace it a tiny bit. I've turned a lot of the girls into not being such freaks about straight hair."

OKlet's get this into perspective. I am not, nor have I ever been, a freak about straight hair. I just have spent the better part of 30 years in a war against my curls. In high school, I dropped in loads of mousse. In my 20s, I tried the Japanese relaxants; in my 30s, I went uptown for fat roller sets from Dominican ladies who really take no frizzy prisoners. More recently, I've partaken of partial flatirons at blow-dry bars such as Blow. With perfectly straight hair, one feels perfectly in control. It's why professional girls everywhere wield tongs and small wind machines in the morning. This year, however, change is in the air. In London President Obama is declaring the end of American hegemony, and the First Lady is wearing asymmetrical Japanese cardigans. Looking militantly authoritative seems so Dubya. I don't want curls, but neither do I want to look like a throwback to Friends, the waning years.

So back in March, for the Metropolitan Opera's 125th Anniversary Gala, I went to Gerald Decock's psychedelic aerie in the Chelsea Hotel and asked for a look to match the most spectacular dress I've ever worn: a YSL evening caftan that is voluminous, shimmery, and cloudlike. With a reputation for tousled, she's-come-undone dos, Decock blew my hair straight with a round brush, then tonged me with a Bi-Tube curling iron from Enzo Milano to create scrunch and "an angel-weight, ethereal frizz." He used U-shaped hairpins to create "zigzag textures." He used his fingers to mess everything up a little. The finish was a spritz of ...