A new book focusing on the history and power of hairdressing is set to be published this month.
Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing will be published on 10 September and is a fascinating insight into the world of hair and the beginnings of the hairdressing industry in the United States.
Author Elizabeth L. Block, an art historian who works at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the Editorial and Publications Department, specialisises in 19th century paintings and representations of women's hairstyles in art. Hairdressers Journal was thrilled to get some time with her to chat more about her latest book research.
We spoke to exclusively to Elizabeth to find out more...
In a nutshell, what inspired Beyond Vanity?
During my career I found that women in the 19th century spent a lot of time and resource on their hair and it was a growing industry. And so even though hair is ephemeral, it's not trivial and it's not frivolous. For me, that's the main point of the book, to illustrate the cultural importance of hair.
What do you cover in the book?
Beyond Vanity is a history of women’s hair and I examine the places, spaces and time devoted to haircare in the 19th century. The book also takes a deep dive into the hairstyles of the nineteenth century, and the industry behind them, it was fascinating looking into the early US hair salons and hairdressers.
There are so many untold stories of business owners, many of whom were women of colour, and the creators of trendsetting styles such as the pompadour and Gibson Girl bouffant. I examine how race and racism affected those who participated in the hair industry, because although the ideal beauty standard in the late 19th century was a white woman with long, flowing, waist-length hair, it was crucuial for me to not just focus on white women. You can't tell the story of hair only through white women. I really wanted to look at how culturally important hair was to women who didn't have control over their daily lives. Enslaved women in American history could assert some control over how they wore their hair. So you could have an enslaved woman working in the fields, and she might wear like a colourful hair wrap that spoke of her heritage.
Do you explore the origins of the modern-day hair salon?
Yes, Middle class women would go to something similar to what we think of as a hair salon, but they weren't called hair salons. They were called hair saloons or hair rooms, which is really fascinating. I found advertisements in 19th century newspapers that said things like 'come to Mrs. Carter's hair rooms.' Female entrepreneurs, especially in New England, set up their hair rooms for their clients. It could be a white woman, black woman or mixed race woman, doing hair out of her home and having clients come to her, or she might rent out a room like next door to her home or on a different floor of the building that she lived in. It's just so fascinating, because not only were they doing hair, but these women were also selling products. They were making their own shampoos and pomades, they were the beginnings of the haircare industry in the US.
What about the hairstyles prevalent at the time?
Hair was central to a woman's social standing in the 19th century. Your hairdresser was essential if you were in the top 1% of New York society, for example Mrs. Astor or Mrs.Vanderbilt had to have a hairdresser. If you were of that echelon, you could not leave your home without having your hair done. So either your ladies maid did your hair, or you would go to a professional hairdresser. And when you were going to say a fancy ball, many of the women would employ a professional hairdresser, normally a man, to do their hair. We have reports in the newspapers of a professional hairdresser coming to the home, which would be a huge mansion uptown. The hairdressers would be booked back-to-back all day before the biggest balls, and the hairstylist had a lot of power – because you could not go to the ball if you hadn't had your hair done. There was a huge market for real hair pieces, and if you could afford them the best on the market was real hair. At the time, the best hair was blonde hair from Brittany in France.
Bonus History Round
Did you kow that plant-based hair colour used to be supplemented with lead? Here's some more interesting anecdotes and tit-bits of information gleaned from Beyond Vanity.
- Did you know that women in the 19th Century would use a candle to singe their split ends – sometimes with disastrous consequences (especially when you consider that they sometimes used Kerosene in hair care products)!
- Men’s pomades in the early 19th Century may have contained bear’s grease, along with a generous squeeze of apple juice in an attempt to mask the terrible smell!
- Later in the19th Century, pomades might be made with a combination of lard, beef or mutton fat, wax, and oil (castor, coconut, or olive). Tasty!
- Can you imagine going to the British Hairdressing Awards with dead birds in your hair? Well, in about 1890, Designer Mademoiselle Louise of Brooklyn created a topper with no fewer than five actual sharp-beaked birds perched in a “nest” of millinery fibre and surrounded by real bird feathers.
- In the late 19th Century, hairpieces were so popular that when human hair supplies ran low, raw materials like hemp, jute or flax were stand-ins.
