KEY POINTS:
Michelle Obama, Gwyneth Paltrow, US Vogue's editor Anna Wintour - the bob is being sported by all kinds of stylish women in 2009, just as it has been in any of the past 100 years. Having survived controversy, scandal, backcombing, bleaching and blow-drying, the haircut is celebrating a century at the cutting edge of tonsorial trends, and remains one of the most popular styles of all time.
Its debut came in 1909, when the young hairdresser Antoine de Paris chopped the actress Eve Lavalliere's hair to make her appear younger for a role on stage in the French capital. The stylist was then bombarded with requests for the look from women who felt it would liberate them from the tedium of preparing the long, elaborate locks that were then in fashion. And so the bob was born.
It didn't take long for its appeal to spread. In 1913, the new style made headlines when the American ballroom dancer Irene Castle became the first American star to wear it.
Frustrated by the fact that her hairpins would sometimes fall out and strike people in the audience when she performed the new, quicker dance steps of the time, she grabbed a pair of scissors and snipped her hair to a level just below her ears.
Out of sheer practicality, women began cutting their hair shorter during World War I, and the style of the bob transferred to the masses in the 1920s, when Vogue illustrations depicted the archetypal chic woman of the period with blunt chin-length hair.
But its popularity did not mean that the bob stopped turning heads. Enthusiastically adopted by society girls and then "flappers", the style was seen as a controversial sign of emancipation, a defiance of social order. Queen Mary asked staff with bobs to conceal them at official events, and headlines such as "Shocked husband shoots himself when wife bobs her hair" appeared in America, where preachers warned that, "a bobbed woman is a disgraced woman".
Thousands emulated the sharp, dark bob modelled by the film star Louise Brooks in the late 1920s, and the style was immortalised in the 1920 short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which a woman is pushed by her malicious cousin into cutting her hair into an unflattering bob that looks "as ugly as sin".
But not all incarnations of the bob have been so stark. Softer variations appeared throughout the next three decades - pincurled in the 1930s, or waved in the 1950s. But it was in the 1960s that the style exploded in popularity once again, when Vidal Sassoon created the Nancy Kwan - a sharp geometric cut that tapers from the nape of the neck. Trailblazers such as Twiggy and Mary Quant also wore blunt versions of the look. Some men, from George Best to The Monkees, even adopted a bowl-like version of the style.
The 1970s ushered in longer versions of the bob - as worn by the actress Faye Dunaway - while in the 1980s it became bigger and bolder than ever on shows such as Dynasty, while it took on asymmetric and radically dyed permutations on the decade's club scene.
Uma Thurman's long, fringed bob in Pulp Fiction sent thousands to the hairdressers to copy her throughout the mid-1990s, before the Vogue editor Anna Wintour helped popularise the "power bob", which has remained a weapon in the armoury of a certain kind of professional or political woman, such as Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice.
Just as modern clothing is inspired by the past, so are hairstyles, and though the bob has never been away, it's certainly as big on the current celebrity circuit as it is on catwalks.
When Victoria Beckham cut off her extensions in favour of a razored bob in 2007, it was nicknamed the "pob" and, even though widely derided by some, it was nonetheless emulated by thousands. Other celebrities followed suit, including Katie Holmes and Gwyneth Paltrow, who have each interpreted the style differently and had it widely copied. And therein lies the key to the bob's survival: there's a version of it to suit everyone.
What a bob can do for you
After years of Wags sporting nasty nylon extensions, the return of the bob is a welcome one. It's hard to get wrong (although, inevitably, a few people do - Natalie Imbruglia's bob is far too short and rounded) and it's very easy to wear.
"You look around and bobs are suddenly everywhere," says the celebrity hairdresser James Brown, who styles Kate Moss' hair. "It's extremely popular and I think a lot of that is down to Kate. She hacked it off herself and then I tidied it up for her - she just fancied a change."
Moss sports what Brown describes as a "Catholic schoolgirl with a twist cut" - a messy, long bob which she achieves by drying it roughly upside down and rubbing hairspray into the roots.
The joy of the bob is that it comes in a variety of styles - Gwyneth Paltrow's is long, Katie Holmes has a short style with a fringe and Agyness Deyn has a bleach-blond Joan of Arc version. It also suits all ages, and a softly-tapered bob will elongate the neck and flatter the face. As for the next big thing, Brown recommends "a soft, messy one that hasn't been too obviously blow-dried". Good news for the low- maintenance follower of fashion.
