Hair

Lavinia Fontana, Portrait of Antonietta Gonsalvus, Daughter of Predro Gonsalvus ("The Hairy Man"), ca. 1593. Oil on canvas. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Blois, 997.1.1.

Glenn Adamson

“I want it long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy shaggy, ratty matty, oily greasy fleecy shining, gleaming steaming flaxen waxen, knotted polka-dotted, twisted beaded braided, powdered flowered and confettied, bangled tangled spangled and spaghettied!” If you’re of a certain age, you’ll probably recognize these lyrics from the title song of Hair, the “American tribal love-rock musical” that brought hippie culture to the Broadway stage in 1968 (and subsequently to television and movie theaters). Compared to the real experimentation happening in the counterculture, Hair was pretty mainstream, a branding exercise of sorts for the astrologically-attuned “Age of Aquarius.” But the show was nonetheless purposefully controversial, mostly for a brief nude scene and a song celebrating the pleasures of sodomy, but also for its celebration of “down-to-there hair, shoulder length and longer,” of unshaved armpits, of natural Afros, of the hirsute body in all its natural splendor.

In the late 1960s, this was fighting talk. The era’s culture war between the squares and the “longhairs” was fought out in salons, schools, and workplaces. And this is only one of countless episodes of hair politics throughout history, which are strikingly various in their expression. Ancient Romans took the hair of their defeated enemies as war spoils and made it into wigs for high-born women. When the Emperor Hadrian began wearing a beard, indicating his admiration for Greek culture, men across the empire followed suit. At the other end of the social spectrum, slaves had their hair cropped short, making their status instantly visible. Domination over the body, indeed, has very often been signaled and symbolized by the enforced removal of hair. Across many different circumstances – in military units worldwide, the African slave trade, and Nazi concentration camps – shaving the head has been a means of taking away individuality, removing cultural identifiers in an attempt to systematize, and sometimes to dehumanize. 

The Chinese Qing dynasty – recently established by Manchu invaders – undertook a particularly large-scale experiment in this kind of social control. In 1645, they imposed an edict known as the tifayifu, literally “changing clothes and cutting hair,” which required all male subjects to wear their hair in the Manchu style, shaved up front and in a long queue at the back, as a sign of fealty. After fierce resistance and ensuing brutal reprisals – thousands of people were slaughtered simply for refusing the hairstyle. Centuries later, the symbolism was still there: rebels associated in the 1911 Revolution against the Qing cut off their queues as a gesture of self-conscious modernity. 

Meanwhile in England, Victorian moralizers were strictly regulating hairstyles for girls and young women, with those unlucky enough to have frizzy or curly hair generally struggling to meet the standard. “I have again and again intimated that I desire the hair to be arranged closely, modestly, plainly,” the dreadful school master Mr. Brocklehurst declares in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. “We are not to conform to nature.” In the 1920s, flappers like Josephine Baker signaled their modernity by rejecting such tidy buns and braids, adopting daring styles like the “Eton Crop” (so-named for its schoolboy appearance). This is also when lesbians began wearing short hair as a way to reject patriarchal norms, and while it took a half century, this “butch” look eventually became dominant, so much so that some queer women came to feel it had become its own kind of conformity. 

These days, there is conflict over the Muslim practice of veiling – covering the hair entirely or partially, as an expression of modesty, in keeping with the Quranic verse, “O Prophet, ask your wives, daughters, and believing women to draw their cloaks over their bodies. In this way it is more likely that they will be recognized as virtuous and not be harassed.” Critics both inside and outside the Islamic faith have seen this proscription as a form of sexist oppression. Adherents of modest dress, conversely, argue that veiling does indeed discourage the objectification of women in public, just as the Quran says. Without adjudicating on this complex issue, it is worth noting that other religions also have long traditions of veiling, including Christianity. The Bible (1 Corinthians 11) decrees that “every wife who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head,” while men are told to keep their hair fully on view. It’s a gender-based disparity that can be observed in traditional wedding ceremonies to this day. 

Wig manufacturer in West Bengal, Kolkata, India, 1 May, 2018. Credit: Saikat Paul / Pacific Press / Alamy Live News.

What accounts for the amazing prevalence, and sheer intensity, of hair-based politics? As so often, it’s helpful to apply a little material intelligence. Lisa Jones, author of a terrific piece of investigative reporting on the trade in wigs and extensions, points out that human hair is “of the body, bodylike, and, to quote shampoo ads, ‘full of body,’ yet not a body part.” Like our finger and toenails, the hooves of horses, and the feathers of birds, human hair is made principally of a protein called keratin, which has a strength-to-weight ratio approximating steel. It has no nerve endings – which is why it doesn’t hurt when the barber cuts it – and while it’s only a myth that hair keeps growing after death (it only appears to, because of the retraction of the skin), the fact is there’s something eerie about this stuff. Hair sprouts continually from us, propagated by stem cells in the skin; in itself though, it is inert. 

The anthropologist Mary Douglas famously observed that any substance that has “traversed the boundary of the body” is inherently unsettling, because it is a reminder of our physical vulnerability, and ultimately, our mortality. This, she argued, is why we have such unease around blood, faeces, spit, and urine, and why they are so often central to ritualistic prohibition. Hair is a special case. It fascinates us when still attached to our body, and disturbs us irrationally when it has separated. The very same strands are beautiful on the head of a loved one and disgusting in the shower soap, because, as Douglas puts it, “a half identity clings to them.”

Close-up shot of hair transplantation procedure, 2021. Gokhan Uzunalan / Alamy.

This idea of hair as a liminal substance, on us but not fully of us, perhaps explains why it occupies such a fraught place in the cultural imagination. It is bound up with many aspects of identity – gender, ethnicity, and age – yet the way it actually expresses that identity is peculiarly changeable. Unlike other physical characteristics, such as skin color, body shape, and facial features, it can be readily altered; unlike clothing, it can’t be changed daily. For most people, the bald excepted, each haircut demarcates a little patch of life, perhaps a few months in duration. It almost demands consideration – the average US woman spends an astounding six full days and $500 per year on managing their hair, much less for men, resulting in what has been called a “grooming gap” – but while people do express themselves in this way, they can only do so within certain constraints. You have to work with what you’ve got.

It seems likely that this volatile condition of “half identity” is precisely why hair is so politicized. The same unconscious logic may also account for the charged quality that it has when incorporated in works of art, craft and design. Victorian mourning jewelry affords a haunting example. The deceased gets one last haircut, marking the transition from life to death; that shorn lock may be left as an undisturbed relic, or alternatively, braided into an elaborate decorative pattern. Either way, as scholar Sophie Renkin notes, the hair serves as “the present reminder of a future absence.” 

The religious custom of wearing a hairshirt or cilice – primarily associated with medieval Europe, but also known in ancient cultures and still known to be practiced today – is motivated by a related impulse. Typically made of the coarse hair of animals like goats or camels, rather than humans, and sometimes made even more uncomfortable through the addition of twigs or metal spikes, these fearsome garments are meant to “mortify the flesh,” perpetually denying bodily pleasure and encouraging a life of religious contemplation, ultimately directed to the hereafter.

For Native American cultures, too, hair is an important spiritual substance. Growing it long is seen as a sign of strength, and it may be cut to signify grief. This was an important influence on hippie hairstyles, part of the counterculture’s broader emulation of indigenous peoples. (The punk “Mohawk,” called a “Mohican” in Britain, incidentally, has little historical connection with those tribes; they did pluck their hair out to leave a small patch, sometimes with a decorative braid, but did not cultivate vertical fans or spikes.)  Conversely, when Native children were forcibly taken from their families and placed in boarding schools, one of the first procedures of assimilation to which they were subjected was a short haircut. The Apsáalooke (also called the Crow), Lakota, Potawatomi, and other tribes incorporate both human and animal hair into ceremonial costumes, including spectacular headpieces called roaches. These are typically made using deer or porcupine hair, sometimes dyed, in combination with feathers and quills.

Here we need to address a conundrum of nomenclature: where does hair end and fur begin? Materially they are the same stuff: strands of keratin emerging from follicles. You might think people have hair and other mammals have fur, but it’s not that simple – think of horsehair, for example. Cats and dogs may be said to have either hair or fur, depending on the length and position of the growth. The difference is really one of degree, and somewhat subjective: fur is short and soft, and grows in a dense pelt, while hair is longer and coarser. 

A fascinating question is why humans evolved to have thick hair on our heads, armpits and pubic regions, with only sparse scatterings elsewhere, while our ancestors, the monkeys and apes, have it all over their bodies. (Whether simians have hair or fur is itself a matter of debate.) Desmond Morris, in his best-selling 1967 book The Naked Ape, argued that the “great denudation” of humanity occurred to help us hunt on the Africa savannah: it helped us stay cool while sprinting after game. This may sound persuasive, until you reflect that cheetahs have pelts – they run up to 75 miles per hour – and equatorial people usually drape themselves in cloth to protect themselves from the sun. 

In fact, our hairlessness probably has more to do with cleanliness. As primordial humans began to settle in encampments, warming themselves by fire and building semi-permanent wooden structures for shelter, they became more susceptible to fleas and other parasites. Evolutionary selection favored those individuals who had less hair, as they could more easily keep themselves pest-free. We did retain the hair on our heads, seemingly for purposes of insulation, which regulates the temperature of our brains. Brows and lashes also stayed put to protect the vulnerable eyes, while armpit and groin hair are thought to have been evolutionarily advantageous primarily because they aid in the secretion and retention of sweat pheromones – a capability that was exploited up through the 19th century in several European folk dances, which involve tucking a slice of apple under the arm and then presenting it to a suitor.

That unlikely image brings us back where we began – not to the Age of Aquarius, exactly, but to hair’s relationship to desire. If we’re always just a hairsbreadth away from politics with this topic, then sexuality is even closer. People have been telling stories about the attractiveness of hair since ancient times, when Ovid had Apollo captivated by the nymph Daphne, whose hair hung loosely about her neck. Sighing, ‘What would it be if it were properly arranged?,’ he assaults her. She flees, praying for rescue. The myth ends with Daphne transformed into a laurel tree, her skin becoming its bark, her arms its branches, her legs its roots, her long tresses its leaves. 

It’s a disturbing story whose power again resides in hair’s ambiguity, its uncertain status between the animate and inanimate. No material is closer to us, day in, day out. We can measure our very life by it, as it grows inch by inch and eventually falls out. To some extent, though, it is always be alien to us, just one pluck from a non-life of its own. Seductive, shapeshifting, and anything but superficial: hair is a material worth caring about, however you cut it.