Li Huang, 26, before and after a trip to Sally Hershberger for a "Twiggy Punk." Photographs: courtesy of Li Huang (left), Todd Selby (right)

This was the year L.A. celebrity hairstylist Sally Hershberger set up shop in the meatpacking district and brought New York the $600 haircut. What sort of a ’do does that buy you? Hershberger’s signature “rock and roll” cut (the choppy shag Meg Ryan made famous), only shorter. Hershberger calls the style the “punk Twiggy,” and once she put it on Kirsten Dunst, would-be Dunsts everywhere began clamoring for it.

Just a block from Hershberger, Bumble and bumble cut the ribbon on an eight-story colossus—part salon, part “hair university”—which was promptly packed with an unlikely mix of uptown types looking for a whiff of downtown cool and downtown girls with pink hair. Orlando Pita, meanwhile, opened right around the corner, saw Hershberger’s six, and calmly raised her two. Eight hundred for a snip? Every chair is taken.

It was also the year when the once-adored Japanese straightening technique lost its luster, and we learned to love a natural wave, speaking to our hairdressers with buzzwords like “layered,” “chunky,” “rough” and “piecey.” Alan Tosler, the art world’s Hershberger (he cuts Rachel Feinstein’s and Tara Subkoff’s hair), suggests this might have had something to do with a more relaxed sense of style. That doesn’t quite account for the return of hot curlers and big, glamorous Zeta Jones–y tresses. (But then, fashion is nothing if not contradictory.) The boys, meanwhile, went for a gentle buzz cut, with an upward-slanting Tintin poof on top for a bit of Anglo-schoolboy flair.

Related:

• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Beth Landman
• Table of Contents: December 20, 2004 issue of New York | Subscribe!