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Who's that girl?

Hadley Freeman can ease your fashion pain
Agyness Deyn attends the 2008 NME Awards at El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles
Agyness Deyn attends the 2008 NME Awards at El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles. Photograph: Lionel Hahn/Empics

Can you please explain why the big fuss over that model Agyness Deyn? She's perfectly pretty but the excitement does seem disproportionate.

Martin Stam, by email

Think back to those times back in a period known as "yore". Back then there was apparently only one channel on TV and two cinemas in the country, so any time any vaguely cultural event happened it was some sort of collectively acknowledged occasion that everyone would experience, disparately but simultaneously. Each household would watch this important event and then, on Monday, everyone would discuss how hilarious it was on Saturday night when bachelor number three did that Rick Astley impression while grabbing his crotch and Cilla made that shape with her mouth. Ah yes, the glory days of culture. Who can be surprised if, in these cold days of cultural fragmentation courtesy of Sky Plus, streaming and DVD boxsets, we all long to return to such a comforting, sepia-tinted nest of cosiness?

Which brings us to Agyness Deyn. Someone somewhere along the line decided that we need a new culture-by-way-of-fashion icon as a sort of generational figurehead. That Moss chick, well, she's just been around a bit long now, hasn't she? And Lily Cole, well, rather unjustly, she somehow became the visual symbol for any discussion about anorexia, so citing her as an icon of fabulous fashionability became a little bit tricky. And then, with the kind of timing that would have Dorothy Parker gasp with envy, up pops Agyness, with her misspelt fake name (Laura Hollins, since you asked), her northern accent (so that what is often referred to as "the London style press" - aka, those big magazines that have a commendable appreciation for the utterly meaningless and will include at least one black and white photo of a model standing by a dirty canal and wearing ugly shoes and a headdress from last year's Notting Hill Carnival - can patronisingly refer to her as "real"), her frankly weird taste in clothes and her fondness for hanging out with people who live in east London. To be honest, there are times when I doubt if she's an actual human being but rather a CGI construct from the office of Dazed & Confused.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure she's a lovely girl and, yes, a very pretty one. But with that peroxide crop and her love of DM boots and strange stretchy miniskirts, surely I'm not the only one baffled by all the adulation of this so-called "style maverick" when Roxette carved this niche with rather more aplomb almost 20 years ago? Crikey, the magazine iD has dedicated its entire May issue to the woman. A little bit of overkill, yuhthink?

But really, let's not be too hard on anyone. Because this is actually just an expression of desire for some kind of collective experience, whether that be everyone staying in to watch the start of the new season of Doctor Who or a fascination with some model. Funny, though, how this very same urge might explain why everyone was so keen to express their love of the emperor's new clothes when, of course, they didn't exist at all. But hey, not for nothing is the metaphor of that fable based on fashion.

How can I convince my girlfriend to cut her hair?

Dan Markes, London

Generalisations are all hideous, but the truth is that all women are funny about their hair. As much as one bucks against the frequent characterisation of women as little more than overgrown wannabe Disney princesses, ladies do tend to associate long locks with femininity. This leads to a common problem known as "women doing something in the belief it makes them look better, when actually it makes them look a whole lot worse" (see also: dieting and wearing clothes that are either too small, too young or too high). This is not to say that they should all give themselves a Judi Dench, but there is a world in between Lisa Stansfield and Elvira. Or, for that matter, Ariel in The Little Mermaid and Ursula, the short-haired sea witch and a classic example of the long v short hair dichotomy in Disney movies.

Gwyneth Paltrow, extraordinarily, provides a useful lesson on this point. Since her recent embrace of a bob cut she no longer looks like a milky-faced vegan who listens to too much Coldplay and possibly doesn't eat enough iron. Instead, she looks as good as she used to be before she was ... um, anyway, you get the point. If Nicky Clarke were here he'd probably make some point about how long hair drags the face down or some such. As he's not, let's just say that the more hair you have, the more prone you are to bad hair days. And Ariel ended up with a dude named Eric. Case decisively closed.


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