The global politics of hair in The Diplomat

[Editor’s note: This piece contains spoilers for The Diplomat season two.] 

“It’s soft power.” That’s Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney), talking to Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), her administration’s Ambassador to the U.K., in the penultimate episode of The Diplomat’s second season. And it’s part of a conversation viewers have been waiting 12-plus episodes to finally see unfold. Yes, at long last, on a show in which our scrappy little protagonist has been running all over London, Paris, and a massive estate in Scotland trying to uncover an international conspiracy that led to the bombing deaths of 43 British sailors in the Persian Gulf, the woman elected to our nation’s second-highest political office is going to explain to her the semiotics of fancy white-lady hair.  

The premise of Netflix’s fizzy, popular, and Emmy-nominated political thriller is that Wyler, a career officer in the U.S. State Department, has her assignment to be Ambassador to Afghanistan scratched at the last minute so she can serve instead in London. It’s not just a change to her posting, though. At first unbeknownst to Kate, it’s also a secret audition for the role of Vice President, from which Grace Penn will soon resign, owing to a multi-million dollar federal funding oopsie by her husband. At least, that’s what Kate thinks is the reason for the upcoming vacancy as she heads into this conversation with Grace. That’s a sufficiently heady brew for both women to steep in all on its own, but The Diplomat delights in layering complication after complication, just to see if all that cantilevering can remain upright, or if it’ll collapse under all that weight. 

So, scoff all you want, Grace explains, but presentation matters. If Grace steps aside from the vice presidency and Kate is appointed to the role, whatever policies she champions will be far less known than her face, which will be ubiquitous worldwide because “every classroom in America, every embassy in the world will hang your picture on the wall.” And the substance of her work won’t have the remotest chance at being taken seriously if what millions of people see every time her face comes into view is, bluntly, a mess. 

What Kate needs to learn and integrate into her decision making and approach, should she decide to pursue the vice presidency, is that the rules of soft power are both unwritten and inflexible. If she wants to pick a uniform to wear as VP, great. But it needs to actually send the message she intends, not the one people are receiving right now, which Grace characterizes as “bedhead” paired with “headlights” (a T-shirt bra should solve that second problem right away). She also notes that “the care of your trousers [is] more than you could manage,” thanks to a paper clip keeping Kate’s fly from opening. It’s stern stuff, but not cruel or untrue. In most instances, Kate has been brushing aside the notion that the packaging matters, but it absolutely does. And it tracks that the only person to deliver that message successfully is a very polished, powerful woman she respects, whose shoes she may soon slip into. 

You can’t talk about Kate Wyler’s bedhead and beyond without talking about Keri Russell’s actual hair. Although she wore many wigs across her six seasons as Soviet superspy Elizabeth Jennings in the 1980s period piece The Americans, what you see in The Diplomat is always Russell’s own hair. Hair and makeup designer Roo Maurice, who is now in her third season of work on the show and the artist responsible for Russell’s look on a day-to-day basis, explains that the now-iconic “disheveled, scraggy” hair waving this way and that as it brushes past Russell’s shoulders is “probably one of the hardest types of hair looks to achieve.” 

Russell and Maurice collaborated to bring down the volume and ringlets her famously “naturally, very, very curly” hair would form if left to its own devices. The design they settled on involved “focusing the curl in the center of the length of the hair” and creating an alternating pattern of curls to the left and then the right, so that “the curls don’t lock together and give that lovely wave.” The technique relies on Russell arriving on set with wet hair, followed by Maurice using a high-powered dryer, curling irons, and texturizing spray, resulting in a purposefully messy “dysfunctional curl.” The irony of the intentional chaos is that it takes time to so wholly subvert Russell’s innate tendency toward elegance, but over two years of working together, Maurice and the show’s lead have refined the process to a brisk 30 minutes. 

The prospect of even that model of efficiency would probably make Kate Wyler blanch. After submitting to beautiful dresses and practical yet still quite chic chignons for a British Vogue photoshoot in the pilot and a gala held at the Louvre in the season-one finale, Kate swiftly reverts to the psychological comfort and safety of a male embassy staffer’s borrowed suit and wearing her hair down again in the wake of the cataclysmic bombing in central London. That airy, wispy, standing-in-front-of-a-jet-engine look is, oddly enough, part of Kate’s armor. The “Vice President Hair” that Grace coaches Kate to adopt is a happy medium: It’s an easy-to-style bun that’s more polished and one she’s more likely to keep wearing because it’s simple to manage, especially with an assist from the bobby pins Grace suggests in a later conversation.

Photo: Alex Bailey/Netflix

Looking outside of Keri Russell’s filmography to understand Kate Wyler’s hair is also instructive. Kate’s natural inclination is to look more like Kate Winslet in Mare Of Easttown than, say, Abby Elliott in The Bear, so even the Vice President Hair goes through several iterations as Kate is wending her way toward deciding she definitely wants to pursue the vice presidency. Maurice and Russell developed a quickly deteriorating bun that makes it clear Kate is trying, but she’s not great at it yet. Having put it up really quickly, the poor thing starts trailing strands and falling apart in the middle of breakfast because she doesn’t care that much and is slightly resentful that this appropriation of her time is necessary at all. 

The climax of Kate’s hair journey this season arrives in the finale’s last five minutes. Trying to give Grace the impression that she’s backed off from her vice-presidential ambitions while her husband Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell) pops into the American embassy to inform the Secretary of State that Grace was actually the architect of the first season bombing of the British navy’s HMS Courageous, Kate greets Grace in one of her trusty “second-tier diplomat in a third-world war zone” suits. Grace knows immediately not to trust Kate, though, because she’s wearing her Vice President hairstyle. 

Moments later, they learn that Hal informed President Rayburn of Grace’s role in the bombing and that he took it so poorly that he’s dead—and Grace Penn is now the President of the United States. One way or another, Kate’s old look is armor that no longer fits, but we won’t know what hairstyle and suit preferences will work for her once the third season, which is currently shooting, arrives.