All off?” a doubtful Italian coiffeur asks a long-haired, 24-year-old Audrey Hepburn in her first starring role as a princess-on-the-lam in Roman Holiday. “All off,” the soon-to-be-gamine commands him. This most famous onscreen haircut in movie history gave rise, in the decades that followed, to a host of imitators – and a single label.
No one knows who was the first to call it a ‘pixie’ cut, or even where the word pixie itself comes from. The dictionary says a pixie is ‘a cheerful, mischievous sprite’ or ‘a usually petite, vivacious woman’. But), and given her serious ambitions, it must have grated. No one would have dared to call Frida Kahlo a ‘pixie’ in 1940 when, post-divorce from Diego Rivera, she immortalised her self-shorn locks in a painting. (The couple would remarry by the end of that year.)
