Strands of Truth: Hair As Expression
Lipstick means little. A slash of red or a brush of beige suggests only that the wearer is feeling frisky or pouty, daring or demure. Slap on all the concealer you want, brush on every iota of blush available, and all you’ll do is cover a flaw or highlight a cheek, hiding, perhaps without meaning to, the woman beneath the war paint.
Now try dyeing your hair. Lighten it with peroxide or deepen the hue from summer to sunset. Chop it off. Go from glamorous tresses to gamine crop. Buzz it, pick it out, and ’fro it. Willfully forget to brush it until the split ends make those around you titter about what you got up to last night. Cornrow it.
Each strand and style is a talisman; hair is the great cultural Rorschach test that telegraphs how we want to be seen and determines how we are seen. It is a powerful weapon wherein lie history and herstory and the truth of who we are. In the tony reaches of Manhattan there is a storied penthouse salon overlooking the Plaza Hotel and the esplanade of Fifth Avenue. There, up so high that the tourists and Upper East Siders become one, John Barrett, the eponymous owner, created a woman out of hair inside a posh department store.
She was the Bergdorf Blonde, a lemony concoction lionized in the late ’90s for her perfect plumage and roots that never showed. She was wealth and whiteness, prestige and peroxide-and, even as he sculpted the look into an icon, Barrett showed that she wasn’t inaccessible, or even real: She could be created. He democratized a bombshell identity with a bottle of bleach.
In the ’80s, hair was “a total escape. Nature didn’t come into it. It was a statement,” Barrett tells me. That artifice eventually gave way to a new transparency, even if that became its own sort of performance. “The statement at the moment is so waves, as hair’s own no-makeup look,” he continues. “It’s saying, ‘Look, I’m so perfect I don’t even have to try.’ There is a uniformity to it, and the goal is somewhat perfection. Not eclecticism, not individuality.”
How did we get there? How did we reach peak coif semiotics? How can a good hair day make (or a bad one break) us? How can a sleek pony, a tight Bantu knot, or a platinum hue define us? Hair is swept up in the continuum of history; we wear it, and its legacy, over our shoulders. Take, for example, the concept of blondes having more fun. “It began as early as ancient Rome, when prostitutes were required by law to dye their hair blond,” says Jennifer Wright, the author of the recent style history Killer Fashion. “That kicked off the idea that sexy, fun women had blond hair, and it conversely implied that women with dark hair were reputable and ‘serious.’”
A Roman edict induced me to buy a bottle of Clairol? What else hides in the twists and turns of a curl? Michaela Angela Davis explores the tensions and politics of hair in her Vagina Monologues–esque video series The Hair Tales, in which black women, including celebrities and activists, rhapsodize about their tresses. “It holds our history, our stories, our ancestors,” Davis says. “It trips people out; it holds their hysteria, their pathologies, and their fantasies about us.”
Davis, a former editor at Essence and Vibe, first became aware of the limited conception of black beauty in mainstream culture as a young woman whose hair was naturally nappy and blond. “I have a color that is associated with whiteness but a texture associated with blackness, and there was something about being black and blond that was difficult for others,” she says. But slowly she and others are moving to reclaim black hair in all its kinky, versatile glory.
“Black hair is art, and we make it artful,” she says. “It is a way in which we praise and express our creativity. Our hair and our style are places of freedom and sites of expression in a place that has sought to make us invisible.”
Loss of hair too can be an emotional touchstone for women. Earlier this year the model and actress Emily Ratajkowski tossed off a seemingly innocuous social media quip: “Hair is a fundamental part of beauty, femininity, and identity.” In the inevitable backlash, Ratajkowski was pilloried for insensitivity. What about those who lost locks to cancer? Were they not beautiful? Feminine? Still themselves? And yet, there is no one answer for any woman.
For a woman already suffering, the impact of illness on her appearance adds an extra layer of trauma, no matter how seemingly superficial the concern. But there is a mote of solace that bears repeating: Hair is just a piece of our identity. It is far from the totality.
In the entertainment realm, J. Jared Janas, a mathematician turned wig, hair, and makeup designer who has worked on everything from Sunset Boulevard on Broadway to The Wolf of Wall Street, dips into history to concoct identities out of glue, thread, needles, and strands. A recent commission for a femme fatale, circa 1900, called for flouncing, cotton-candy Gibson Girl hair-a look named after the artist who defined it, Charles Dana Gibson. At the time, such hair was loaded with significance: It meant a woman was, well, loaded.
“Historically, if you had more hair you had more money. More was always more,” Janas says. “What does more mean today? That changes from year to year, based on the mood of the moment.” At a time when nothing is of greater value in the zeitgeist than authenticity, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that women have put a premium on natural hair and movement.
But Janas’s meticulous work raises the question: What is the emotional distance between his creations and the characters we fashion each morning before our mirror with a brush and a spritz of hairspray? What do we see when we look into our hair-into ourselves, as it were? Grab a comb. Whom will you play today?
This article appears in the May 2018 issue of Town & Country. Subscribe Now
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