Throughout The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton makes several references to Ponyboy’s hair. When the Soc’s are chasing him in the beginning of the novel, and then when Johnny and Ponyboy are hiding out in the church on the hill, he becomes very upset when he has to cut off his hair. Hair is part of the Greasers’ identity, he says. The Greasers do not have much, except for their hair. The Socs have their cars and their rings that are a symbol for their wealth and how it leads to them being destructive, but the Greasers don’t have cars or expensive rings. The story takes place in the 1960’s (about), when clean cut, short hair was the norm. Having long hair allowed the boys to differentiate themselves from the rest of society.
Towards the middle of the novel, when the boys are on the church in the hill, Ponyboy gets very distressed when Johnny says that he will have to cut and dye his hair. “It was my pride. It was long and silky… Our hair labeled us greasers, too – it was our trademark. The one thing we were proud of. Maybe we couldn’t have Corvairs or madras shirts, but we could have hair.” These sentiments prove that hair was not simply hair to Ponyboy. The hair symbolized his connection with the gang, and by cutting it off, he is cutting his connection with the gang. Disconnecting himself from the gang allows him to develop his own identity, which is reflected when Ponyboy tells Johnny that he never could appreciate the sunsets or mention the Robert Frost poem with anyone else in the gang.
His hair was a statement. A few pages later, when Dallas comes to visit them, he says “Kid, I swear it don’t look like you with all your hair cut off. It used to look tuff. You and Soda had the coolist-lookin’ hair in town.”
Hair was one of the few things that the gang had that they were proud of. It symbolized their connection to one another. When Ponyboy was freed of his Greaser hair, he was freed of what held him back from truly being himself.