There’s something happening with scrunchies. They are pinging up everywhere. At Topshop they cost £4 and come in velvet, corduroy and sequin. At Balenciaga, they are fashioned from hot pink patent leather and retail for a cool £145. They are also a very current pop culture reference. In I, Tonya, the biopic of disgraced figure-skater Tonya Harding, Margot Robbie’s scrunchie game is so strong it threatens to eclipse her rhinestone-covered leotards.

According to I, Tonya’s costume director, Jennifer Johnson, scrunchies are more than scraps of fabric-covered elastic: they are historical artefacts, freighted with meaning.

The Balenciaga scrunchie.

In the late 80s and early 90s, Johnson argues, “as the diet changed in the United States, with subsidies to the corn industry seeing everything slowly becoming supersized and people eating more, clothing changed too, getting looser and lazier”. The rise of the scrunchie was part of that trend. “The idea of dressing with ease, the shift away from taking too much time with yourself, really started to take hold then, and the easiest five-second polished hairdo is the velvet scrunchie,” she says.

Scrunchies have long inspired deeper feelings than a floppy hair accessory should merit. As first lady, Hillary Clinton was so derided for her use of scrunchies that she joked that she should call her memoir The Scrunchie Chronicles. Meanwhile, Carrie Bradshaw was so impassioned in her criticism of the hair accessories that she said, in season six of Sex and the City: “No woman … would be caught dead at a hip downtown restaurant wearing a scrunchie.” That may have killed scrunchies dead for a decade, but now it’s become meme: millennial favourite brand NastyGal sells a £2 scrunchie called Sorry Carrie Bradshaw.

Corduroy scrunchie from Topshop - £4. Photograph: Topshop

The modern rehabilitation of the scrunchie is drenched with irony, particularly at Balenciaga, a brand that trades on creating high-fashion versions of typically non-glamorous items such as Ikea bags. This revelling in lack of quality, this “tease about bad taste” was something the team on I, Tonya “wanted so badly to stay away from,” says Johnson. “Tonya is so easy to make fun of, and there was so much about her story which was surprising and that I didn’t know. I wanted to pay as much respect to her as possible.” Also, she says, there is an icky class dimension at play from designer brands who riff on “white-trash or trailer-trash” stereotypes, who “make fun of lower socio-economic groups in the 90s”.



On I, Tonya, the use of scrunchies had the opposite meaning: it was a sign of Harding’s pride in her appearance that she so closely matched her scrunchies to her outfits. Most were created by Adruitha Lee, the hair designer, “who was incredibly crafty,” says Johnson. “She and her and assistant would make a lot of them, or find them in cheap and cheerful shops – drug stores – which is also where Tonya’s ‘Chanel’ earrings came from. Sometimes we would take those and embellish them. Margot loved them and would take them home and wear them.”

Scrunchie by Mansur Gavriel.

Certainly, it’s possible to wear scrunchies without being arch or snobby. For spring/summer 2018, hip New York brand Mansur Gavriel used them to secure loose low ponytails on the catwalk, creating an effortless end-of-double-PE kind of look. Also, scrunchies are straight-up useful: the fabric gives volume to buns, without resorting to those weird doughnut contraptions, and avoids creating dents in the hair, without the need for those odd plastic spiral hairbands. Also, they look nicer on the wrist than your standard strip of elastic – and, by all accounts, the wrist is where the cool kids are wearing Balenciaga’s £145 version.