Her hair got plenty of attention, anyway. “We had lots of expressive moments,” Wright says, including what he terms “the bangs heard around the world.” Like so much in Washington, the cut had been a practical choice. Obama was coming off of an intense campaign season, and Wright had been using a lot of heat on her hair. “It just started to wither in her fringe area,” he says. “And I was like, ‘Let’s cut bangs to get these dead ends off.’” Within weeks, Wright received a call from the West Wing, complaining that the bangs were distracting the press from her husband’s re-election bid. During the 2016 election, he contemplated a pixie cut, but he opted against it, thinking it might draw too much attention away from the race’s presumptive winner Hillary Clinton. “Then Trump won, and I was like, ‘Oh, damn! We should have done it.’”
Ian McCabe, a colorist who has worked in D.C. for almost 15 years, acknowledges that residents are “more serious and buttoned-up” than the client base in other major cities. But he pushes back on the idea that the rank-and-file are still looking to Laura Bush for hair #inspo. “I see clients who come in and tell me, ‘I don’t want Washingtonian hair,’ especially in the last five years,” he says. “People want to look current, with no preconceived notion of, ‘If I work in politics, it must be this.’”
Lately, Wright has been watching how Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a first-term congresswoman from Texas, wears her hair in braids and experiments with different looks. It’s evidence that Michelle Obama did make a difference. “Michelle gave her permission, and now she’s giving other women permission as well,” Wright says. “And that will continue—for Democratic women and Republicans.”
Indeed, at Izzy’s, Goetz cuts the hair of women on either side of the aisle, crediting the salon as one of the few places where politicians from both parties interact on neutral ground. “You very quickly learn what side they are on, and you just respect it and talk about the weather,” Goetz says. “Whoever wants to look professional, respectful, and elegant for the job, that’s for me.”
