Advertising Sectioned - Hair Business

Hair Business

One thing you can always rely on is our ability, as a species, to be self-conscious yet completely lacking in self-awareness. Never have so many of us expressed our unique selves in such a limited range of nearly-identical ways as on social media, but that’s only the most recent example. If the digital age gets the blame, this condition pre-dates the internet by decades, if not centuries.

It was certainly visible when the eighties – with a chutzpah that can only be marvelled at – decided to brand the seventies ‘the decade that taste forgot’. Presumably it did this while working some wet-look gel into its hair, checking out its floral wallpaper and fake-marbled furnishings, then adjusting its ridiculously patterned shoulder pads in a mirror it wasn’t actually looking at.

True, the seventies was over-fond of colour combinations involving swirls of orange, lime green and brown, but how replacing those with fiddly new variations in black, red and electric pink (then calling them ‘designer’) came to be considered an improvement must remain one of life’s mysteries. Perhaps it all comes down to a simple formula: the more alike two things are, the greater the rivalry and antipathy between them. So it is with the seventies and eighties, two decades that produced more absurd hairstyles, dubious interior design and barely-wearable clothing than the rest of the last century combined.

Look again at this advert for the services of Hair Business back in 1988. Not only is it typeset entirely in red and black, which was obviously compulsory at the time, its central photograph seems to be a portrait of a young Art Garfunkel being straddled by one of Charlie’s Angels after an encounter with a lot of gel in a wind tunnel. It really doesn’t get more seventies – or more eighties – than that.