The Changing Fashions In Haircuts

By Jimmycox

Although fashion is so important to women, the fact is that surprisingly few women understand its workings. Fashions develop, usually with logic, from human nature, from the lives people lead, their needs and desires, sometimes unconscious.

A wise man once said that if he could have only one book from which to learn about any era in history, he would not choose a serious scientific study but a book of fashion plates. It is the costumes people wear, their haircuts, accessories and cosmetics that show what they were really like at any time in history.

It is generally agreed that women choose their hair styles and their clothes in order to look beautiful, but beauty in fashion is not absolute like beauty in nature. A rose that was beautiful a hundred years ago would still look beautiful today.

Although standards in art are less positive than standards in nature, a Renoir painting that was beautiful in his time still looks beautiful to us. But the fashions of past periods which were considered lovely in their own day may look strange, quaint, or even grotesque to us.

The lack of an absolute standard for fashions is proved by the fact that as fashions in hair styles and clothes change, women adopt or adapt each of them in turn and still always succeed in looking well.

During World War II, long pageboys and upsweeps were the vogue. In 1947 the New Look introduced short, cap-shaped haircuts. Yet at both times, women looked attractive because they were in fashion. The styles in women's clothes followed a similar pattern.

This leads us to the conclusion that a fashion is successful partly because we have become accustomed to looking at it. When designers or stylists try to change fashions too quickly, they meet resistance from some of the public who cannot adjust their standards abruptly. They need time for their eyes to become accustomed to the new fashion.

Fashions in beauty

There are also changing conceptions of women's beauty. Every period has its own ideal of beautiful womanhood. Fashionable Greeks and Romans admired women with oval faces and figures that were much fuller than those we admire today.

In our grandfathers' time, popular beauties looked like Lillian Russell. In the Twenties, the flat-chested, hipless figure was in vogue.

There are many reasons for changing fashions in beauty. Some we can figure out, others must remain obscure. In earlier periods of history, it was often a queen or a member of court circles who influenced fashion.

Because Queen Elizabeth I had red hair (genuine or otherwise) her followers admired red hair. Later, fashions were set by social leaders, by stage stars and then movie stars.

Mary Pickford inspired a whole generation of mothers to force corkscrew curls on their daughters. Greta Garbo popularized the long bob, Jean Harlow the platinum blonde craze.

It is safe to say, however, that none of these women could have created the various vogues single-handed, unless the public was ready for each of them in turn. In Miss Pickford's time, the ideal was the little girl type. Later the worldlier Garbo and Harlow answered the public's need for a new standard to follow.

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