Scrunchies Are Back! Or Are They?

A ballerina wearing a lovely burgundy scrunchie while warming up at the barre.Source/ZUMAPRESS

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Here’s your big fashion news of the week:

Women are wearing scrunchies again—in public, and most notably, to the office, where their presence is producing reactions ranging from unbridled enthusiasm, to jokes that might not be jokes, to silent judgment. Some scrunchie fans wonder if they will be taken seriously while wearing one.

….Scrunchies, often in bright colors and patterns, were once everywhere….But W Magazine included scrunchies on its trend list for 2018. Scrunchies appeared on the runway at New York Fashion Week in September during the Mansur Gavriel show.

….Cassandra Jennings, 22, recently tested the scrunchie waters on Wall Street. She works at a marketing firm and usually dresses up, but was having one of those days. “I had a normal hair tie in my hair at first but then my eyes were just going to my scrunchie,” she says. She pulled her hair back in a tight bun and put on a white velvet scrunchie. No one said a word, but she felt self-conscious the whole day.

“I was aware that I was wearing it,” she says. “I think I was judging myself.”

Here in the Drum household, we no longer wear scrunchies. They have long since been demoted to cat toys and then demolished. This means that our current cats have never even seen a scrunchie. That’s kind of sad, so maybe we should buy a few.

Anyway, let’s take a poll. How many men reading this (a) had any idea what a scrunchie is, (b) knew that it was fatally dated, and (c) would have judged any woman wearing one? Also: why isn’t the singular spelled scrunchy?

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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