The Long and Short of It

By EMILY MITCHELL

Fashion fortune tellers peered into their crystal balls and predicted a brief life. Men wearing ponytails, they said, that's just a momentary fad. Another trend will appear and -- snip! But the style gazers were wrong. The ponytail is not only hanging in there but also showing up in new and popular variations.

What grows around goes around. In the 1960s down-to-there hair was the counterculture's banner. It was extolled in a musical named -- what else? -- Hair as "long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty." Baby boomers, who now occupy the midlife establishment scorned by Hair, took up the ponytail as a way of being nostalgic while subjecting their flowing locks to a certain adult discipline.

Wally Rubin, 35, an assistant in the office of Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger, has grown his hair for a year, partly, he says, "because it was practical." It was also his way of keeping alive the Age of Aquarius. While Michael Aymar, 32, was on Wall Street as a bond trader, he kept his hair short, following an unwritten code. But last year, yearning for his student days, he asked his bosses at an ad agency if there was a policy on hair length. He got no reply, and today his ponytail is 4 in. long.

In the meantime, the Founding Fathers' favorite hairstyle had reappeared on the mainstream American fashion scene as a European import that went companionably with well-heeled 1980s glamour. Shampooed and conditioned, it no longer had the scruffiness of the hippie look, and instead was associated with Old World hipness. "It's safely deviant," explains Michael O'Loughlin, 31, an editor of the San Francisco Examiner, who recently cut off his 6-in. ponytail and got a longish crewcut.

Since ancient times people have believed that long hair bestows power and an aura of sensuality. Cliff Aron, 34, president of BEI, an energy-services firm based in New York City, has a ponytail that ends an inch below his shoulders. When people see it, he says, "they know they're dealing with someone special. They have to feel that I am successful if I can get away with this." Bob Rolke, 18, a varsity swimmer at Washington's American University, has barely had a trim in the past two years and says of his mass of bronze curls, "The girls like it." The ponytail's most notable practitioner is undoubtedly Hollywood's Steven Seagal, the impassive karate black belt whose hit movies Hard to Kill and Marked for Death helped popularize the style.

The ponytail of the past, held back with an elastic band, has been joined by plaits, queues and thin, razor-cut hanks of eccentric design. Gary Margolis, 45, director of a counseling center at Vermont's Middlebury College, believes that hair has once again become a font of Zen expressionism: "How you wear your hair speaks of the inner self." The message may be simpler. For many men, it may just be "I don't have to put up with haircuts anymore." The tyke who protested when he was first lifted into a barber's chair may be the ponytailed man in the power pinstripe suit who has a big chair of his own in his fancy office or even at the head of the boardroom table.

The ponytail may be a style for all seasons, but new coiffures are coming up on the outside. Among them: a Hell's Angel look and what Supercuts haircutting chain calls "gangster chic." The first, a greasy down-and-dirty tousle once displayed by actor Mickey Rourke, can be achieved by gel overload or shampoo avoidance. For the gangster look, men can turn for inspiration to the oily Mafia sleekness seen in GoodFellas and the forthcoming Godfather III; actor Andy Garcia is its patron saint.

What could be next? Appropriately enough for an aging boomer generation, the shiny pate is becoming acceptable, even noble. Cheers' Ted Danson has gone public with a hint of skin gleaming through his thinning strands. Television luminaries Charles Kuralt and Joe Garagiola are boldly bald, so who knows? Maybe it will soon be time again for the Yul Brynner look.

With reporting by Kathleen Brady/New York and Margaret Emery/San Francisco