Animal bristles, hairs and other surface appendages are orientated with the body axes and with adjacent structures to form precise macroscopic patterns. Unusually, in frizzled 6-null (Frz6–/–) mice, the hair follicles are orientated randomly in utero but re-orientate after birth to create large-scale hair patterns. Jeremy Nathans and co-workers now describe the spatial and temporal dynamics of this hair follicle reorientation process (p. 4091). By analysing follicle orientations in Fz6–/– mice during late gestation and early postnatal life, they discover that an apparently local alignment pattern generates macroscopic patterns that compete with each other. Reorientation of the hair follicles at the junctions between different territories leads to the formation of whorls and crosses, which disappear within a week as the territories expand to generate long-range order. The researchers suggest that mouse hair follicle reorientation, which closely resembles the wing and thoracic hair realignments seen in Drosophila planar cell polarity mutants, could be driven by a follicle repulsion or interfollicle chemoattractant mechanism.