If you ever wanted to know what ladies were up to at various
points throughout history, you need only look at the top of
their heads – whatever was going on with their follicles was
a pretty good indication of the times. Say, for example, if
you came across a dame who’d chopped off her locks in the
15th century – you could safely assume she was willing to risk
her life for what she believed in. Short hair could get you burned
at the stake in those days, which is exactly what happened to
Joan of Arc. Sentenced to death in 1431 for heresy by cross-
dressing, the 20-year-old was just trying to get mistaken for
a dude so she could avoid getting pawed by sex pests in the
military, for goodness sake.
Nearly 500 years later – in the 1920s, to be precise – women with
short haircuts were still causing the general population to lose
the contents of their bowels. Thankfully, the penalty for having
a bob at this time wasn’t death, although it was prohibited in
some places, including schools and hospitals (nurses in the US
weren’t allowed to cut their hair to ear-height or above). It was
also considered so controversial by mainstream society that
most hairdressers flat-out refused to cut ladies’ hair into a bob,
or coupe à la garçonne (‘a boy cut’), as it was known in France.
It was associated with flappers, you see – that generation of
lasses in the Western world who had the audacity to do stuff
women didn’t traditionally do, e.g. drive cars, drink booze, smoke
ciggies, have casual sex and – yes – even listen to jazz.
But it wasn’t female jazz fanatics who first started the lopped-off
trend. We can thank Russian ‘intellectual women’ in Greenwich
Village for that. Just like Joan of Arc, these ladies (or ‘saboteurs’,
as they were known) were in the habit of cutting their hair short
in order to pass themselves off as dudes – a cunning disguise
to avoid police during the Russian Revolution. According to
The New York Times, they were responsible for kicking off the bob
“epidemic” in the States, along with certain female students who’d
chopped off their manes to play basketball. People everywhere
considered the haircut a threat – preachers conducted sermons
denouncing the hairstyle, and so-called health experts circulated
pamphlets warning women of the dangers the bob could bring.
One physiologist claimed that by cutting their hair short, women
were “violating their nature”, and that it would ultimately lead
to baldness. A news report from England, meanwhile, insisted it
would stimulate the growth of facial hair.
As for the fashion press, while they thought it was cool (or ‘darb’,
as they might have said back then – ’20s slang for ‘wonderful’),
they didn’t expect the style to actually take off. “There is little
likelihood of its general adoption,” Vogue stated when the trend
first emerged in 1915. But not only did the bob become huge, it
injected unprecedented volumes of cash into the hairdressing
industry – once hairdressers finally relented and agreed to snip
women’s hair to the shorter length, that is. The bob was also
responsible for launching some of our best known and loved hair
accessories: the bobby pin got its name for holding the hairstyle in
place, and the headband added a decorative touch to the blunt cut.
As the years rolled on, so did our hair – literally, during World
War II, when ladies rushed to get their mitts on plastic rollers
in order to make their mane go all wavy, thereby fulfilling their
‘patriotic duty’ to look gorgeous. It was more than a tad ironic,
though, given that this was the time women were entering the
workforce in droves, since their blokes were being sent off to
shoot each other. Practicality was probably more important
than aesthetics, which explains why women working in factories
tended to roll their locks at the nape of the neck, sometimes
covering them with a scarf tied à la Rosie the Riveter (she’s that
iconic babe with her sleeve rolled up, saying, “We can do it!” – ‘it’
being producing munitions and war supplies).hair today,
gone tomorrow
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