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...