Sweet summer hair

Totally in love with what Susie Bubble calls the "70s poppy/preppy" look in a scene from Anh Hung Tran's screen adaptation of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood.

This look should be easy enough to recreate eventually through several rounds at the thrift stores. The 70s might be my favorite decade in vintage.

The sweet little barrettes got me to thinking about summer hair, though. I was big into barrettes a few years ago to keep my longish bangs off my face. It's a small but effective gesture. A funny incident: the best friend of my boyfriend at the time came to visit us in Texas, along with his girl from Washington state, who had built her own yurt using scrap material and ingenuity in her mother's backyard and who now lived with the best friend in another hand-built house on land they homesteaded in Alaska. She was a sturdy girl. Anyway, I could sense that she took an instant dislike to me, even though she kept exclaiming, "you're the cutest thing ever!" I don't think that was a compliment, quite, in her book. But the funny thing was that later that day when they were driving around, she made them stop into a drugstore so she could buy some barrettes.

Barrettes, like braids, are icons of girlish innocence and fit right in with the ease of summer. You don't see them done often enough.