Hair Wars

Commenting on Virginia’s recent post on glamour and the multiplicity of desire, belle de ville wrote,  “Circa 1969 I saw a page teenage magazine on how dress like a weekend hippy...and I begged my mother for that outfit.” This caused Kit Pollard to wonder about the “modern hipster aesthetic,” as she felt that in some ways “it’s purposeful anti-glamour.” I confess that I’m not sure what the “modern hipster aesthetic” is or was, but for some reason her question made me think about the battles that were often fought over hair in the 60s. (At right is a photo of me and my then-fiancée, now wife, in 1968.)

My parents decided that how I wore my hair was not worth fighting about (other things were). Thus I went through flattops, a Fabian-inspired pompadour, and a James-Dean cut with little comment from my parents. To me the opinions that mattered were held by the girls I was dating or wanted to date. This photo was taken after a concert when I was in graduate school, and I’m wearing the tuxedo I performed in. A beard and mustache were uncommon for orchestral musicians, but I adored a woman (and still do) who liked me in a beard and mustache at that moment in time—so there I am. (I had probably grown the beard to try an “alienated artist” look.)

In contrast, for my fiancée and her parents, hair and clothing had for years been battle issues. Like many of her friends, she had wanted long hair all through high school, but almost none of their parents would allow it. Many parents at that time saw hairstyles as ideological issues, and, for many of them, long hair conjured up images of debauched Beatniks and hippies. To my future wife, the thought of coffee-house poetry and female folk-singers with long straight hair had seemed intellectual and exciting. Sadly, any effort to grow her hair longer had been literally cut short by a forced trip to a hair salon. Only after leaving for college could she start growing the long hair she desired. Questions of hair length, shoe styles, skirt lengths—such things had often been the cause for battles that she had usually lost while living at home. (As you would expect, her parents disliked both her longer hair and my beard.)

In this tumultuous period of history, as America divided over our involvement in the Vietnam War, some people saw hairstyles as ideological statements, whether intended to be or not. Are hairstyles no longer an issue now? Or in some households is the way that teenage children want to wear their hair still cause for household warfare?

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