Standards of beauty have varied enormously according to time and place. Yet as long as people have ordered their social relations, hairdressing has had a role in the struggle for status and reproduction. Humans, writes Robin Bryer, are unique in two aspects of their behavior: wearing clothes and having their hair cut voluntarily (p. 9). Hairdressing is part of the human condition.
One presumes that the first hairdos were long, scraggly, and filthy. Even given the general squalor atop primitive heads, however, it is likely that some hair was considered more attractive and admirable than others. What is certain is that wherever primitive society congealed into civilization, it produced a culture of hair-dressing.
, the author Richard Corson quotes a seventeenth-century source describing a teenage noblewoman attempting to turn her hair blonde. After exposing it to the hot sun for hours and anointing it with a coloring substance that seemed to produce the effect, she was afflicted with a near-daily nosebleed and
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being desirous to stop the Blood by the pressing of her Nostrils, not farr from her right Eye toward her Temple, through a pore, as it were by a hole made with a needles point, the Blood burst out abundantly, and ? shee was diseased by the obstruction of her courses (p. 173).
Archaeological evidence suggests that the early Egyptians wore their natural hair in tight braids. That changed with the discovery of the art of wig making. Hair was then cut short or shaved. Young boys retained their queues, but adults who could afford them wore wigs, especially for special occasions. Specialists made up elaborate headdresses filled with jewels and expensive accessories and splashed with oils and perfumes. The Mesopotamian civilizations preferred heavy beards and long hair, often frizzed or waved. At Knossos, Cretan women wore elaborate coiffures, with golden hairpins, and lots of makeup. As always, different codes distinguished elites-kings, nobles, priests-from commoners.
The ancient Greeks invented the beauty salon, where women had their cheeks blanched with white lead and their naturally blonde hair artistically dressed. Sometimes it was dyed red or blue. Spartan brides cropped their hair; Athenians wore veils over their dressed hair. They cut it as a sign of mourning. Beginning in the fifth century B.C.E., Greek men began to wear their hair short. It was Alexander the Great who insisted that his soldiers shave their beards in order to deprive their foes of a handle during combat.
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Typically, the Romans at first copied the Greeks and then developed more elaborate hairstyles to match the imperial ethic. Men often wore their hair short, in what came to be called the Titus, after the Emperor. Attended to by the barbers who worked at the marketplaces and public baths, or by their slaves (who were shaved bald), both men and women curled their hair and dyed it red. They applied costly oils and pomatums or wore expensive wigs. The most extravagant powdered their hair with gold dust. In the East, Byzantine hairstyles blended Greco-Roman culture with oriental. Men wore moderately short hair, mustaches, and beards. Feminine coiffures incorporated pearls and precious metals, which were also used for ecclesiastical costumes. Sometimes the fashion was for bare heads, sometimes for ribbons or ornamented turbans. Turbans became standard in Moorish culture-although the Islamic injunction against graven images, like that of the Jewish religion, means that documentation of Islamic hairstyles remains sparse before the Christian Middle Ages.
The paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites have provided a certain image of Arthurian damsels and knights. A small amount of evidence suggests that the period between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Normans in England favored flowing locks and facial hair for men. But, in fact, very little documentation about hairstyles during the Dark Ages survives.
The revival of European culture in the Middle Ages also brought back something like international fashion, of which coiffures were a part. Hairstyles differed between northern and southern Europe. And if the return of fashion meant anything, it was that coiffures popular at one moment became
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In the next-although the fashionable moment in the Middle Ages could be rather long by later standards. The bobbed styles for men of the twelfth century were still around in the fifteenth, when smart Venetian gentlemen were also sporting yellow silk wigs. Depending on the time and place, women wore long braids or huge, horned headdresses. Or they packed their hair into a variety of bonnets and bags, often adorned with jewels and expensive knickknacks. The expanding middle class ordinarily adopted quieter versions of these noble styles. Poorer women wore their hair long and enclosed. Their men folk cut theirs short or shoulder length, while beards and mustaches came and went.
By the Renaissance, whatever the particular arrangement, hairstyles had become one of those idioms of international art that allowed fashion to circulate across the continent. Variety and inventiveness were the rules. Hair was frizzed, or not. Some women plucked or shaved their foreheads-thus becoming highbrow, in the manner of Elizabeth I, who was also reputed to own a hundred perukes. Blonde was the hair color of choice, and women bleached their hair by sitting in the sun and using saffron or medicated sulphur. Blonde wigs became the vogue in France and Italy, and nobles-Marguerite de Valois, most notably-would engage blonde maids in order to command their hair for wigs. Mary, Queen of Scots possessed many beautiful curled wigs and adorned her head with lace. Other ladies used pads and wire frames to give their coiffures volume.
Contemporary illustrations of the early sixteenth century depict Englishmen with long hair and clean chins. Beards were more popular on the Continent. By the end of the century, English courtiers had cut their hair and adopted stylish beards with precious names such as the swallowtail and the spade.
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The portraits of the great Flemish painter Sir Anthony Van Dyke capture the Cavalier style that reached its height in the 1630s and 1640s, with men sporting long hair and neat, pointed beards under wide-brimmed hats. Hair became politicized briefly, during the English Civil War, when the more austere Protestant Roundheads battled the more elegantly coiffed forces of the English king, Charles I. The Pilgrims of the Colony of New Plymouth condemned long hair for men as prideful.
The Puritan position on hair must have softened, for later portraits of Cromwell depict him with longer hair, although not nearly as long as the styles coming out of the French court and brought back to England with the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. This was the great age of periwigs for men. Indeed, the French court imported so much blonde hair that Louis XIV's finance minister Colbert tried to ban wig making in France so as to stem the outflow of French gold.
The most popular women's styles of the period were the hurluberlu-unevenly cut and crimped, with two long curls over the shoulders-worn by Louis's favorite, Madame de Maintenon, and the Fontange-with its high curls secured by ribbon and bow-invented by the king's new mistress, the Duchess de Fontange. The fashions of Versailles traveled to all the other courts of Europe, and from there to the modish classes of every country.
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In the eighteenth century, women's hair became the principal focus of art and conspicuous consumption. The massive headdresses of the middle decades serve as both the symbol of the Old Regime and the classic image of excess in fashion. It was in the 1770s that coiffures reached their most exaggerated form. Wendy Cooper describes a certain Madame de Lauzun, whose enormously high headdress, stuffed with the usual assortment of trash, was topped with modeled ducks swimming in a stormy sea, scenes of hunting and shooting, a mill with a miller's wife flirting with a priest, and a miller leading an ass by its halter (p. 95). Coiffures grew so immense that doorways had to be enlarged, and in two instances ladies were killed when their headdresses were set on fire by chandeliers. Men of weight and fashion in the Enlightenment wore modest, powdered wigs, although George III made enemies of English wig makers when he took to powdering his own natural hair.
The powdered look disappeared altogether in England when the Younger Pitt imposed a one-guinea tax on hair powder. Events in France had an even more revolutionary effect on hairstyles, as the fall of Louis XVI swept aside the fashion habits of the Old Regime. An era that admired the civic virtues of classical antiquity found men and women wearing their hair
, with their hair pulled up off the neck in imitation of those about to be guillotined. In the aftermath of the Terror, women wore their hair long and loose over diaphanous dresses. No one in Revolutionary France wanted to look like an aristocrat.
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In the nineteenth century, men's hairstyles tended to the short and simple. Common in one decade, facial hair vanished in the next, only to return thereafter. In mid-century Naples, the government so objected to mustaches that it instructed police to shave them off offenders.
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