Hair Styles

by Read Listen Learn

Men and women have always worn their hair in very many and very different styles. Long and short, curly and straight, covered and free, natural and dyed...the possibilities go on and on. There are only two things that have never – well, almost never – changed. One is that the rich do not wear their hair like the poor – they’ve always used their hair styles to show their social class. The other is that men and women don’t have the same hair styles.

In the west, they have only worn their hair in the same ways twice: the first was in the 1920s, when women cut their hair short for the first time; and the second was when both men and women wore their hair long in the late 1960s. Both times, politicians, teachers and other people with power became really worried about what this meant for society.

In Ancient Rome, rich women wore their hair in very complicated fashions. These could take several slaves hours to make every morning. The Romans also lightened or darkened their hair. They used acid to lighten it but dead leeches in wine to darken it. Although rich Roman women showed their wealth by their hairstyles, their husbands nearly always kept their hair cut short.

After the fall of Rome, women let their hair grow as long as it could. This was the fashion all over Europe for a thousand years. Men, on the other hand, let it grow to their shoulders and then cut it. Sometimes poorer men just shaved their hair when it got long. Neither men nor women wore hats and the only decoration was a band to keep their hair out of their eyes.

It was only in the fifteenth century that women started to cover their hair. They didn’t even let a single hair show and shaved their necks so that nobody could see a curl. Perhaps, then, it was not surprising when a couple of hundred years later, tired of their plain styles, women started to wear their hair in very complicated ways. Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I show jewels in her hair and, a few years after she died, women were wearing feathers and fruit and dead birds in it. Red hair became popular, as women tried to copy the Queen. A century later, women were adding hair extensions so that their hair styles were huge.

The twentieth century has seen the most varied styles though. From the bob cut in the 1920s and ‘30s, fashion changed in the ‘50s so that women had huge hairdos. It wasn’t easy for them. First, it meant a long evening sitting in the hairdresser’s, which cost a lot of money as well as taking a lot of time. Next, they had to use curlers in their hair every night, which took several minutes to put in every evening and several more to take out in the morning. Of course, they also looked very unattractive and women could not go out of their houses or have visitors when they were wearing them. Just imagine sleeping in them!

In the 1960s, pop music brought fashionable young men with guitars, but also with hair that continued getting longer and longer as the decade got older. The Hippies, with their flowers, message of peace, free love and hashish, were unusual. They wore their hair long – both men and women – and protested against the Vietnam War. They thought the future was theirs, not their parents’, and decided to live their own lives. The newspapers answered that they should wash and cut their hair.

At the same time in the United States, Afro-Americans started to wear their hair very big. Michael Jackson and his older brothers, Jimi Hendrix and Aretha Franklin walked the streets with very large hairdos. But then Bob Marley came along and the ‘Afro’ died as dreadlocks came in. White youngsters in London were dyeing their hair green and pink and orange as they listened to punk rock. It looked like life was never going to be the same again, but... everything changes with time.

With all these different styles, it was young people who were leading the way. Politicians’ hair grew a few centimetres shorter or longer, but if we look at world leaders in the days of the Hippies and now, we cannot really see much difference in their clothes or their hair styles.