The abbé Pierre’s haircut, obviously devised so as to reach a neutral equilibrium between short hair (in indispensable convention, if one wants to go unnoticed) and unkempt hair (a state suitable to express contempt for other conventions), thus becomes the capillary archetype of saintliness.
But at this point things get more complicated—unknown to the abbé, one hopes—because here as everywhere else, neutrality ends up functioning as the sign of neutrality.
-Roland Barthes, “The Iconography of the Abbé Pierre,” from Mythologies (1957).
