Wigging Out

In opulent color, the wigs for Fendi’s spring 2019 couture collection transformed models into a unified fashion force for bowl bobs. The appeal of an on-theme army of girls has inspired wigs on the fashion runway again and again during the accessory’s twentieth-century history. For this look, key hairstylist Sam McKnight cut wigs for each model and had them dyed to echo both the marble architecture that inspired the collection and the clothes themselves. Dyeing a wig to match the dress on the fashion runway dates back to a collection by the House of Lucile in the early twentieth century, but this Fendi collection connects back to an earlier point in wig history as well. Held in front of the Temple of Venus and Roma, the models were wearing their wigs in front of a monument built by Roman Emperor Hadrian in the year AD 121. Hadrian was a wig man himself, as he famously took up a toupee upon going bald. Though the clothes in the collection evoke Roman mosaic tile and Renaissance sensuality by way of an extremely posh disco, the wigs offer a more specific precedent. The straight, face-framing bob revivifies the wig styling of Vidal Sassoon. Best known for his geometric haircuts, Sassoon’s style lent itself well to wigs, since they typically did not have a pronounced parting, which was always the telltale sign of fake hair. Of course, the coloration obliterates any naturalism, but the theme was the striated color of clay, moss, stone, and marble of a Roman ruin, so some green had to be in play.

From the luxury industry of three thousand years ago, this cosmetics container provides a peek at the earliest wigs. This little swimming girl wears a wig as she is towed through the water by her pet gazelle. The high style and craftsmanship of this girl and her little wig reflects the value assigned to self-devotion in Ancient Egypt where wigs were a common accessory to the beauty regime, stored in women’s private chambers alongside perfumed oils, lip color, rouge, and kohl for painting the eyes. A small container like this could contain any kind of makeup, while serving as a reminder that one is always fully dressed in a wig. As a sidebar, a wig one could swim in was something of a holy grail in twentieth-century wig making, not achieved until the 1970s. Though this figure is shown to be swimming, her wig probably represented the ubiquity of fake hair at the time, rather than a water-tight construction technology lost to history.

Periods of unabashed and widespread wig wearing are fairly rare in fashion history. Though secretive uses of fake hair are a constant, out-and-proud wigs like this late seventeenth-century number have to find their moment. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were such a moment for men, especially in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, when the full-bottomed wig reigned in all its glory. Some of these wigs were made on a base of skin, but some were proto-lace fronts set on a net base. The growing universality of wig wear is embodied in this depiction by Baroque carver C. Lacroix, who captures the uncanny valley of the wig: the slightly-too-low hairline. Since this wig’s “tell” is literally carved into stone, this author assumes it is no accident. Wigs were supposed to look like wigs in 1700, and they were treated in portraiture like the luxury objects they were. That was why artist C. Lacroix gave the low forehead and curls equal time and consideration as the profusion of lace tied at this unnamed gentleman’s neck. These were equally needful things in an era when men’s luxury outstripped women’s by a mile.

For the tighter and tidier wigs in the mid-eighteenth century, the hairline issue was solved by blending of the wig with the natural hairline at the front. Using matte white paint, artist Louis Tocqué has captured this technique, along with the generous application of white powder to the hair of fashionable young jeweler Arnoldus van Rijneveld. The procedure, which was handled by a valet, was to use a waxy pomade to integrate the natural hair into the hair of the wig. The pomade doubled as adhesive for the wig powder as well. The lush curls would have also been set with pomade and powder, though likely by a hairdresser in advance of putting the wig on for an occasion. The length of the wig, as compared to the swashbuckling full-bottomed wig, was subdued and tied in the back, which emerged as the proper choice for formal occasions in 1730.

While wigs were inarguably luxury objects in the eighteenth century, they were also the focus of satire and moral disapprobation. At their height, wigs were spectacular and performative, and their proper wear required at least a modicum of narcissism, qualities that were beginning to be judged as dubious in men. The social circle of the Macaronis inspired particular anxiety with their ostentatious wigs. Thus, there is a lot to unpack in this anonymous print from the late eighteenth century of a man and his absurdly tall wig, and this author fears that none of it reflects well on the gentleman. The lascivious dog, the servant shining his shoes, and the leering man with a pickax notwithstanding, the extreme style of this Macaroni’s hair is shown in high contrast to the other men in the image, and it seems to be the central story of this print. It reveals this moment in men’s wig wearing as having a highly specific group of participants. The key elements of the Macaroni hairstyle, graciously highlighted here by the artist’s exaggeration, were the padded height and the cadogan, or club queue, where the length of the braid was folded back on itself and wrapped in fabric. This was likely a way to reassert the extreme (and extremely expensive) volume of seventeenth-century big wig hair, but in a very different configuration. The man in the wig is set apart, but maybe not in a complimentary way.

Hair in the late 1770s got so big that there was room for political discourse on top, a fact that drew illustrators like Matthew and Mary Darly to frame satire as hairstyle. While the size of the hair is exaggerated in this Darly print (above), the intent is not. Some women wore their politics on their heads instead of their sleeves in this period. These hairdos so perversely enjoyed by satirists like the Darlys weren’t necessarily wigs. The ideal of the 1770s was to wear one’s own hair. Still, for what the author would call special event hair, a lot of extra was bound to be required.

While satirists took some dramatic license with eighteenth-century women’s hair, fashion plates from the period support that the extreme was ideal, and those had their own conventions for the illustration of 1770s big hair. If seventeenth-century men’s portraits had a subgenre of wigs-n-armor, then eighteenth-century women’s portraits could claim big hair and small dog as a consistent cliché. This fashion plate (right) is especially exemplary because the dog seems to have shared in the attentions of the hairdresser, along with its mistress (it is from a group of prints devoted to fashionable women and their “small masters”). The shape of this style required a huge hair pad underneath and the addition of proto-extensions of “false hair” (which is to say, natural hair acquired by the hairdresser to complete and perfect a massive coiffure). Once the false hair was applied, all the ribbon and jewel decor on the hairdo would serve to hide the seams where false hair extensions had been plastered over natural hair.

Big hair for women fell at the end of the eighteenth century but rose again in the 1820s. Flowers in the headdress were clearly in fashion in 1830, as this woman’s head echoes the still life flower arrangement that she’s attempting to paint a version of. To make a hair vase that could support an arrangement of flowers, pre-made braided hairpieces would be required (unless the woman in question was an exceptionally committed cultivator of extra-long locks). Fortunately, a burgeoning hair industry was making just those very things to sell at hairdressers and, before the century’s end, by mail.

While the fashionability of wigs ebbed and flowed, the high-style tradition of fancy dress meant that hairdressing and wig history always retained a place within the fashionable milieu. The style of eighteenth-century coiffure was dead for obvious reasons (see the French Revolution), but it could be, and often was, revived for fancy dress parties, which circulated wig styles through the fashionable world and wig technique through fashionable hairdressing salons.

The second coming of wigtopia after the eighteenth century came in the 1960s, when all women were advised to build a “wig wardrobe.” The hairdresser Kenneth—one name only—used multiple hairpieces in subtly varied shades in an expression of haute hair for the women of style contemplating whether to build a wig room onto their closets. Here, his hairpiece serves to subtly repeat the ombre transition of the feather bodice worn by the model. Credited with creating Jacqueline Kennedy’s bouffant, Kenneth was one of the titans of the New York City hair scene, having headed up the salons for beauty maven Helena Rubinstein and milliner Lilly Daché before opening an eponymous salon with the support of a beauty supply firm. His skills and long shadow still inform fashion editorial and runway hair today. The Kenneth look was not one easily copied by women looking to re-create a hairstyle at home, or to simply plop on a wig and head out the door. Kenneth’s big hair was hair that required a hairdresser to look good, no matter how cheap synthetic hair would become in later years.

Contemporary wigs and hairpieces encompass the whole history of the art form and live in the everyday as well as in the fantasy of the runway. The power of transformation that a wig supplies can still draw intense criticism when its use highlights differences of race, class, and power. There was a cautionary tale in the furor unleashed when Marc Jacobs and key hairstylist Guido Palau got inspired by 1990s candy ravers and decided to dress the models for Jacobs’s spring 2017 collection in brightly colored, wool dreadlocks acquired from an artist Palau found on Etsy named Jena Counts, who hand-dyed the locs. While Vogue.com reviewer Nicole Phelps merely noted the height added by the dramatic hair and said some of the clothes might be “much too precious to wear to a rave or whatever the kids are calling their all-night parties these days,” social media went supernova with rage about the appropriation of a hairstyle associated primarily with Black hair. Jacobs responded with a defensive non-apology at first, which only extended the outrage before the designer responded again with more contrition.

For many critics, the issue came down to proper credit for the style, which would have acknowledged the dreadlock hairstyle’s origins in the Rastafari movement, which originated in Jamaica in the 1930s, and to the overall lack of diversity on fashion runways. The controversy was also another flare-up in a long history of dubiously conceived dress-up games of which wigs and hairpieces were a crucial part. The transformation of identity that wigs, extensions, and hairpieces allow remains fraught with power, as it was from the very origins of the wig in Ancient Egypt.