Skinny Jeans - All Banged Up

Due to unprecedented levels of festival-related busywork in other sections, you might notice that Fashion has been cut a little shorter this month. Apt, really; given that the thrust of today's sermon is a hats off, a thumbs up, and a high five to that most holy of trimmable institutions: the fringe.

Although Edinburgh's Fringe-with-a-big-'F' is admittedly a vital cultural institution, clearly worth in-depth consideration and a justifiable degree of reverence, here we like to keep things lower-case and shallow, so you'll find no trace of Polish street theatre in the following 458 words. Rather, the matter at hand is the facial procenium arch: the noble straight-across bang, and all those who wear her.

If reliant on the weekly glossies for information, you'll be under the impression that the bang's recent explosion is due wholly to Kate Moss' recent chop. However, given their predilection for attributing pretty much everything, from the return of ankle boots to perestroika and glasnost, to a model from Croydon, this clearly is neither accurate nor well-researched information. Moss was not, in fact, the first human ever to prune herself a fringe and, truth be told, the recent resurgence probably has more to do with the mainstream onslaught of the chronically self-documented MySpace/Nu-Rave/Cory Kennedy revolution.

But these fairweather friends are not our main point of interest. Moss' fringe is already growing its way out, anyway - untrimmed and on its way behind her ears as we speak. No, the straight-across fringe is an institution unirked by noncommittal, flippant dalliances. In its long-standing parish is a dizzying array of staunch believers; essentially nothing without their hair-headbands (apart from all that talent, of course), and in it for the long-haul, until the black turns grey. Would you recognise a bang-less Ramone; and would Bettie Page have been pinned up quite so much without that shorty-short fringe? Then there's Chrissy Hynde and Cat Power's Chan Marshall - both long-term disciples whose allegiance to the horizontal bang (steady...) knows no end nor bounds.

This is why, you see, Kate doesn't count. The straight-across fringe is a rugged entity, demanding upkeep and commitment; leaving those who can't take the heat of those straighteners begging for a hairband. The horizontal eye-skimmer is the full-fat to the side-swept's low maintenance diet version; the marriage versus the easily outgrown fling. But despite its demanding personality, the ruler-cut edge garners extraordinary fidelity - Hynde and the Ramones must have notched up a century's worth of monogamy alone, and we're much too polite to ask Vogue's Anna Wintour how long she's been in the club. We only know she's not leaving any time soon.

The ones who stay are the ones who know there's nothing more rock & roll than glowering out from beneath a real eye-skimmer, even if you're not in a band nor running Condé Naste. Fringes are magic - making hair-up still hair-down, and given some selective grooming and an elastic band on bad days, offering the illusion that the whole head is luxuriously well-finished.

Fringes are fantastic. So much so, I want one. And were it not for a gnarly theoretical brawl between my hairdresser and bank manager, and a lack of colour printer with which to run off a hundredweight of photographs of Jane Birkin and Grace Slick from Jefferson Starship, I'd have one already.