As Lily Collins surely knows, there is a mysterious rung on the career ladder wherein young professionals are faced with an existential dilemma: to bob or not to bob. I.e. will you maintain the innocent tresses of youth, or razor them into a shock of sharp lines because you are now decisive and strong-minded? Do so, and you are no longer an anxious junior climbing the slippery pole, but Joan of Arc staking her claim in the soil.
There is a proliferation of powerful women bobbing about fashion circlesâand the beauty reporters of this magazine have created an entire schema for their hairstyles: the princess bob, the Italian bob, the bubble bob, and the mob bob. Apparently these all look very different from one another! (And most notably produce an internal shift within a person.) Take, for example, the former ingénue Lily Collins, who last month debuted something called a razored bob, and with it a visible change in attitude.
Mad, bad, and perhaps now a little bit dangerous, the actor was yesterday afternoon photographed in a leather Magda Butrym blazer with wide-legged pants and bitchy Manolo Blahnik pumps, while in New York promoting the second part of Emily In Parisâs fourth season. The sweeping ball gowns, floral bubble dresses, and puff-sleeved red-carpet numbers of her early days on Netflix have otherwise been sidelined for graphic Saint Laurent suit jackets, Gucci jumpsuits, and sinuous Versace column dresses. And who could blame her? This is a psychic (and restorative) departure from playing an all-too-eager PR in a polka-dotted beret.
This article first appeared on British Vogue.
