Some time in late 1969, Jane Fonda walked east on St. Marks Place in lower Manhattan and stopped at number fifteen. The sign above the door read Paul McGregor’s Haircutter. She had just finished shooting They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? on a Hollywood soundstage. Her marriage to the French director Roger Vadim, who had cast her two years earlier in Barbarella as a literal sex symbol, was in collapse. She had spent most of the decade as a packaged blonde, sold to American audiences as her husband’s fantasy object. She walked in, sat down in McGregor’s chair, and said, “Do something.”
What McGregor did was unusual. He did not pick up scissors. He picked up a straight razor, asked her to keep her hair dry, and cut vertically into the hair from the crown outward. The technique built unequal layers that fell against each other in ways no scissor cut could produce. Fonda’s heavy blonde mane became a brown, choppy, feathered shape that lay close to her skull at the top and feathered out at the jaw. She later wrote in her autobiography that it was her “first deep hair epiphany,” and that Vadim sensed immediately the cut was the first volley in her move for independence. The marriage was effectively over.
Two years later, that same haircut, worn by Fonda’s character Bree Daniels in Alan J. Pakula’s Klute, would put a name on the technique. McGregor had originally called it the Funky. The world called it the Shag.
15 St. Marks Place
Paul McGregor was not a credentialed hairdresser. He had been a longshoreman, a sandhog, and a truck driver before he arrived on St. Marks Place in 1965 and opened a shop in a building that had previously housed almost everything except a salon. He said later that the block was “where people came for ideas,” and he was right. Across the street, the Electric Circus ran Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable with the Velvet Underground as the house band. Down the block, Limbo sold vintage clothes to Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. The Fillmore East was around the corner on Second Avenue. The neighborhood was, by 1968, the densest concentration of countercultural retail in North America.
McGregor’s contribution to that ecosystem was a technique. The dominant cutting school of the 1960s was Vidal Sassoon’s: geometric, scissor-cut, architectural, designed to fall back into shape every time the wearer shook her head. Sassoon’s cuts were precise enough to function as engineering drawings, and his five-point cut from 1964 had reset the entire grammar of European hairdressing. McGregor went the other way. He used a razor instead of scissors. He cut vertically while the hair was dry rather than horizontally while it was wet. He built shapes that looked deliberately uneven, because uneven layers moved when the head moved.
Sassoon was making architecture. McGregor was making clothes. The Shag was tailored, in the literal sense; it was cut against the body in real time and finished by hand. Sassoon’s geometric bob was the same on every head it touched. The Shag was different on every head, because the razor responded to the hair in front of it. That difference would carry the cut everywhere geometric hairdressing could not go: onto men, onto curly hair, onto faces that could not carry a symmetrical bob.
He called his version the Funky. Nobody outside his shop used that name.
From Bree Daniels to Rod Stewart
Klute opened on June 23, 1971. Fonda won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as the call girl Bree Daniels. The haircut got nearly as much press as the film. Within eighteen months, McGregor’s shop on St. Marks Place had a client list that included Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn, and Faye Dunaway. Beatty studied McGregor closely enough that when he produced and starred in Hal Ashby’s Shampoo in 1975, the character of George Roundy, the Beverly Hills hairdresser sleeping his way through his clients, was widely understood to be modeled on him.
But the more important spread happened sideways, into rock. The Shag, because it was a technique rather than a shape, worked on any length and any gender. Rod Stewart wore an extreme version on the cover of Every Picture Tells a Story in 1971 and made it the visual signature of the Faces. David Cassidy wore a tidied-up Shag through the entire Partridge Family run from 1970 to 1974, which is to say through the most-watched window of American teenage girls’ television lives. By 1972, variations of the cut had appeared on Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and most of the front line of the British rock scene. By 1975 it had crossed back over and landed on Patti Smith, whose Robert Mapplethorpe portrait for the cover of Horses used a Shag as a deliberate refusal of glamour.
This crossover was new. In the 1950s, men’s hair and women’s hair had been built on different equipment, different products, and different shops. A barber gave you a pompadour with clippers, scissors, and pomade. A salon gave a woman a bouffant with rollers, setting lotion, and a hooded dryer. The two grammars did not share tools. The Shag dissolved that separation. McGregor was cutting Jane Fonda and Warren Beatty on the same chair with the same razor, charging both of them the same fee.
The Unisex Argument
The economic consequence of that dissolution was a quiet bloodbath in American barbering. The traditional American barbershop, a small single-chair or two-chair operation serving men, had been the standard delivery system for men’s hair through the entire twentieth century. The Shag did not require a barber. It required a razor and the willingness to cut hair dry, and any salon could offer it. Through the 1970s, men started defecting from the barbershop in numbers the trade tracked with alarm. By the end of the decade, the National Association of Barber Boards of America was warning that traditional barbering was contracting faster than at any point in living memory.
The salons that picked up that business sold the Shag as part of a broader package they marketed as unisex hairstyling. The term was new. The economics were new. A unisex salon could charge a man several times the price of a traditional barber cut for what was, on paper, less labor. McGregor’s own cuts were priced well outside the reach of a working-class man buying a haircut on a Saturday morning. The premium was not for time. It was for the appearance of being cut by someone whose other clients were on magazine covers.
That class story matters. The Shag was originally a downtown haircut, born in a shop on St. Marks Place that shared a block with a record store and a head shop. By the middle of the decade, it was a status purchase that signaled access to the same chair as Warren Beatty. The cut had not changed. The pricing and the address had.
It also matters that the customers who lost the most ground were the full-service Black barbershops, which had functioned as social infrastructure as well as haircut delivery and were particularly exposed when the unisex salon model began absorbing the men’s market in white middle-class neighborhoods first. The Shag itself was not the cause. The unisex pricing model it enabled was.
Feathered, Layered, Blown
The Shag did not stay still. By 1976, a softened version had appeared in American living rooms in the form of Farrah Fawcett’s hair on Charlie’s Angels. Fawcett’s stylist, Allen Edwards, had taken McGregor’s razor-cut layers and added a dramatic outward curl at the face, achieved with a round brush and a handheld blow dryer. The result, called feathered or winged hair, became the most copied women’s haircut of the decade. The Farrah poster, shot by Bruce McBroom against a Mexican Indian blanket in his backyard, sold an estimated twelve million copies between 1976 and 1979, the bestselling poster in history at that point.
For men, the same evolution arrived through John Travolta. His character Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, released December 14, 1977, wore a feathered, blow-dried Shag with a side part and lift at the crown. By the end of 1978 the cut had a name in the barbering trade: the disco cut. It was, mechanically, the same technique McGregor had used on Fonda eight years earlier, finished now with a blow dryer and a round brush instead of left to air-dry against the head.
That finishing tool is the part of the story that gets undersold. Through the 1960s, the handheld blow dryer had been a marginal product. Most American women dried their hair at home under a bonnet or hood dryer set over rollers. The 1970s was the decade in which the handheld dryer went mass market, driven by Consumer Product Safety Commission guidelines that finally made the things reliable and by motor improvements that finally made them powerful. Lady Schick ran television advertisements with Fawcett herself demonstrating her Speed Styler. By the end of the decade, the handheld blow dryer was a standard wedding-registry item. The Shag had created the demand for a styling tool that could finish a layered razor cut at home. The dryer had filled it.
Pomade Is Dead
The Pompadour needed pomade. The Mop-Top needed a comb and a steady barber’s hand. The Shag needed a razor and a dryer. By 1979 every working salon in America owned both, and the barbershop, which owned neither, had begun the long contraction it has never reversed. The next decade would belong to the salon, the blow dryer, and the unisex chair, and the silhouettes that came out of that grammar, from Princess Diana’s wedge to the mullet, all trace their tooling back to a Greenwich Village shop where a former longshoreman cut Jane Fonda’s hair on a slow afternoon in 1969.
McGregor himself lost interest. By the late 1970s he had converted his St. Marks Place shop into a roller-skating disco, then a bar called McGregor’s Garage, then Boybar, one of the East Village clubs that defined 1980s drag. He died in 2013. The haircut outlived the shop.
The Shag was not just a haircut. It was the moment American hair stopped being divided by gender at the level of the tools and started being divided by money at the level of the chair. Disco inherited that arrangement. So did the eighties. So has everything since.