Rihanna has been showing off her cropped hair on Instagram to celebrate the end of Pride month.
This isn’t the first time the 33-year-old singer has experimented with a pixie hairdo – it was her signature look in 2008 and she modelled it again in 2012 – but it’s a departure from the mullet style she’s been rocking since the beginning of the year.
Rihanna’s chop is perfect timing for summer, when the weather starts heating up and the last thing you want to deal with is long hair. A pixie cut is low maintenance and the epitome of French cool girl chic: you don’t need to faff around with much styling, you can just wash and go.
If you want inspiration for your own summer chop, Rihanna is part of a long line of iconic pixie cuts…
1. Audrey Hepburn
For the 1954 movie Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn made the pixie crop her own – and she kept the style for most of the Fifties. Her short cut was swept to the side with a Parisian-style fringe, showing off her equally iconic eyebrows.
2. Twiggy
Supermodel Twiggy’s pixie is arguably the most famous haircut of the 1960s, but it almost never happened. Twiggy was 16 in 1966 when she first got the style – short hair with a side parting, always paired with mega long eyelashes. In 2020, she told the Table Manners With Jessie Ware podcast she was too shy to say no to a stylist in a posh Mayfair salon who wanted to cut her hair – and the rest is history.
3. Mia Farrow
Mia Farrow modelled short hair for her Golden Globe-winning performance in the 1968 horror film Rosemary’s Baby. Legend has it, hair maestro Vidal Sassoon flew in to chop off her long locks for the beginning of the movie – perfect for showing off her delicate features.
4. Halle Berry
Halle Berry made history in 2001 by becoming the first – and only – black woman to win the Academy Award for best actress, for her role in Monster’s Ball. She accepted the award in suitably iconic fashion: a sheer Elie Saab gown and a messy pixie cut. This hairstyle became Berry’s signature look for most of the Noughties – in the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day, she famously walked out of the sea wearing nothing but an orange bikini and short hair.
5. Natalie Portman
Natalie Portman had to shave off her hair for the 2005 movie V For Vendetta. Growing out a buzzcut can be awkward, but Portman managed to style it into a perfect, Mia Farrow-inspired pixie cut, that looked like it was made for her.
6. Emma Watson
Many of us get new looks when entering a new phase of life, and that’s exactly what Emma Watson did when the Harry Potter film series drew to a close. She cut off her long auburn locks, telling the Metro in 2010: “I didn’t get to experiment with dyeing and chopping off my hair like most teenagers. I also felt, ‘Right, I’m 20, I’m not a little girl any more’. I’d been on Harry Potter for 10 years, so I needed to mark the end of it in some way. I needed a drastic change and that’s what the crop was all about.”
7. Zoe Kravitz
Zoe Kravitz is a beauty chameleon: one day she might be sporting blonde waves, and the next she’ll have long braids. However, our favourite of her hairstyles is definitely the pixie – whether it’s bleached blonde, slicked down or kept messy, she shows how versatile short hair can be.
