The History of Hairstyles & Hats

It was the first hairdo. Now we slip forward a few thousand years to the time of the Babonians in the Near East. See what kind of hairdos they had. Well, they not only curled their hair, but they curled their beards, too. It was a religious rite with them. Now we go over to the land of the Egyptians about 2,500 years B.C., and notice a change. They shaved their heads completely, and they shaved their beards, too. But they wore an artificial beard made out of wood or horn or some such material. And the women, too, shaved their heads and wore wigs. Now, of course, we're talking about the aristocracy, the noble people and the rulers of those days, not the poor people. And here is an Egyptian woman with the kind of imitation hair or wig that was worn by the highborn ladies of those days. Another thing about the Egyptian women of those days was that the higher the headdress they wore, the more noble their blood was supposed to be. So you can see there was quite some competition among the ladies in a vertical way. Really getting high in some of these. Another peculiar thing was that when the princesses or queens acted in an official way, they, too, wore an imitation beard on their chin. Now we're coming forward to the Grecian days. Now, of course, we know all about these from drawings and paintings of the old days and written descriptions. And many of these pieces, by the way, are actual survivals of those periods and have been preserved in antique shops and in museums. This is the Greek style of hairdo. Of course, at all ages, a scarf was often used as a covering for the hair with or without a hat on top of that. Now we're coming forward to the Roman days. There is a Roman painting and a peculiar place for it. It's on the bald sconce of a Roman. And here we have one of the Roman ladies of the court of Augustus Caesar. And this is the kind of wig that she wore. A very dark wig. Now she sees her handmaiden there with a very blonde head of hair and plentiful, and she decides to change her mind and get a blonde wig. Whereupon the poor handmaiden has her hair cut off and made into a wig for the patrician Roman lady. Here we see her now with a blonde wig. Well, we'll step forward about a thousand years into the beginning of the medieval period. And this is the way the highborn young lady wore her hair then in long ringlets when knighthood wasn't flower. Of course, when she got married, she wasn't allowed any such frivolous decoration. Had to put her hair up in braids that were covered like this. Of course, the braids may not be quite as long as the covering would indicate. Just a little added decoration. Just another example of the scarf wrapped around. This young lady does not have a toothache or an earache. She is just increasingly wrapping around her hair on her head, and it gradually got to an exaggerated fashion. More and more of the face and hair were concealed until we got to this type, which became popular in Brittany in France hundreds of years ago. And then we had also in medieval days a sort of dunce cap idea. And once an idea was formed, why, they carried it out to the extreme. So here we have the double dunce cap and even further the triple and quadruple dunce cap idea. Further decorations were added. Now we come to what I call the antler type of hat. Looks something like the spread of antlers of a water buffalo or some African gazelle. The ox type of decoration. This was popular, by the way, in England, oh, about the time of Ivanhoe and Richard the Lionheart. Only for highborn ladies, of course. And then, of course, the men weren't going to be completely left out of the picture. Here's a gentleman with a tall vertical hat. And just in case of a change in the weather, notice that he has a different type of hat slung over his back. Well, we're coming down through the ages a little bit, but not making much progress in the millinery department. This chap has a whole counter's worth of cloth on his head. Now this is on the neat side, but that hairnet is studded with precious jewels. In this case, it's the first cost and not the upkeep. It's often called the Holbein type of hat, because that famous painter gave us many canvases with models wearing that kind of picture hat. But Franz Halsen and other famous painters also gave us their studio portraits with the same type of millinery decoration. Here's quite a different type. The hat is small, but the beard more than makes up for it. Now this is really neat. I say I'm no judge of ladies' hats, but this is the type I like anyhow. It'd be good in a high wind. Notice that the ruff is now coming in around the neck there. That would be around 1550, 1600 and through there. Just imagine all the handwork that went into the ironing of a ruff of that type. Many of the pictures by Van Dyck feature these ruffs. Here we're going into the vertical decoration again. You notice how it switches from the horizontal to the vertical and back again? High, low. Oh, and also we are coming into the corseted era, and in some of those old days they actually wore iron corsets. Of course, the whaling captors soon relieved the iron of its duty by bringing in the whalebone. This is just a simple country costume. I'm glad to say they've relaxed on that iron stuff. And here we have a lace bodice and a straw hat. Now we're coming into the 17th and 18th centuries. This is a model of a painting by Van Dyck. And so I haven't time to go on down to modern days, but as far as we've gone, I leave it up to you to know whether or not we've made much progress in hairdos and costumes and hats. Well, here we are back in a cave on the banks of the Dordogne River in France, thousands of years ago. And there's plenty of hair, as you can see, on the gentleman, but no hat and no hairdo to speak of. That hair is really interfering with his business. Nearby, the cavewoman, his wife, is grilling a fish over an open fire. Now the caveman is very plainly bothered by that hair that is growing so plentifully on his head in all directions. Suddenly he looks over toward the fireplace and he sees the surviving backbone of a fish that has been eaten. And it gives him an idea. He doesn't know that this happened, but it could have happened and some such original discovery must have been made. Now see what he does with the backbone of that fish. Puts up his hair as best he can and uses the backbone, or part of it, to hold it in place.