Scrunchies Are Back! Or Are They?

A ballerina wearing a lovely burgundy scrunchie while warming up at the barre.Source/ZUMAPRESS

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Here’s your big fashion news of the week:

Women are wearing scrunchies again—in public, and most notably, to the office, where their presence is producing reactions ranging from unbridled enthusiasm, to jokes that might not be jokes, to silent judgment. Some scrunchie fans wonder if they will be taken seriously while wearing one.

….Scrunchies, often in bright colors and patterns, were once everywhere….But W Magazine included scrunchies on its trend list for 2018. Scrunchies appeared on the runway at New York Fashion Week in September during the Mansur Gavriel show.

….Cassandra Jennings, 22, recently tested the scrunchie waters on Wall Street. She works at a marketing firm and usually dresses up, but was having one of those days. “I had a normal hair tie in my hair at first but then my eyes were just going to my scrunchie,” she says. She pulled her hair back in a tight bun and put on a white velvet scrunchie. No one said a word, but she felt self-conscious the whole day.

“I was aware that I was wearing it,” she says. “I think I was judging myself.”

Here in the Drum household, we no longer wear scrunchies. They have long since been demoted to cat toys and then demolished. This means that our current cats have never even seen a scrunchie. That’s kind of sad, so maybe we should buy a few.

Anyway, let’s take a poll. How many men reading this (a) had any idea what a scrunchie is, (b) knew that it was fatally dated, and (c) would have judged any woman wearing one? Also: why isn’t the singular spelled scrunchy?

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate