Hackles—So Hot Right Now

Since everyone’s already weighing in on hair hackle madness (see: here), thought we’d share an excerpt from the current issue.

 

Hackles—So Hot Right Now

Fishing trends come and go. New rod resins, Ten Spicy Nymphs For Dirty-Water Dredging, or waders with internal pee bladders might last several seasons or fall dead on arrival. But the newest trend sweeping fly shops seems to have legs, and it’s an atypical curve from not-so-far afield—the local beauty salon.

    Hackles, thanks to a growing number of women pursuing the finest to pin into their bangs, are flying off the shelves.

    “I had a gal come in the other day, a hairdresser, and she bought $850 worth of feathers,” says Steamboat Flyfisher co-owner Steve Henderson. “I bet you that within the last six months, 80 percent of our feather sales have been to non-fishing customers.”

    An 80 percent sales jump in anything fishing related is no joke, and this is not a Steamboat anomaly. On a recent Thursday night in Fort Collins, we drank $2.50 pints at a crammed bar with local hair stylists Holly Hynes and Rachel Bradley, who took us through the process of hackle/hair installation. Digging through her blond mane, Holly produced a grizzly hackle worthy of a dozen Parachute Adams.

    “Touch it,” she said. We obliged. 

    Upon further probing, the girls abruptly left, hackles sashaying in hair, without surrendering phone numbers for further investigation.

    But the evidence is out there, even all the way across the country.

    “When Tom Whiting, from Whiting Farms, told me to expect to start seeing hair dressers in our fly shop I told him, ‘This is Maine, not California’,” says Jim Bernstein, from Eldridge Bros. fly shop, in Cape Neddick. “Wouldn’t you know it, the next day a pretty girl comes through the door of the shop, looks around, then makes a bee line to the Whiting Eurosaddles. When she asked me if I could get them in pink, it was a givaway.”

 

 

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