Anne here and today I'm talking about hair — specifically hair in the Regency and Victorian eras, not just hairdos but exploring a few attitudes to hair.
Hair (on the head — not so much elsewhere) has long been regarded as a woman's glory, and for much of history most women grew it long. Short hair on a woman signified that either they had been ill and their hair cut off to conserve their strength, or that some other disaster had befallen them. In Ancient Greece when the burial of the dead in the ground began, widows would cut their hair and bury it with their husbands. Centuries later women accused of being Nazi collaborators had their heads forcibly shaved to shame and humiliate them.
However in the Regency era it became very fashionable (if also a trifle daring) to chop off your hair. Thus we have some young ladies looking like this. This is a portrait of Lady Caroline Lamb.
At the same time, other young ladies kept their long hair and their maids arranged their hair in elaborate updos. (If you want to watch a short video on how to create a regency-era hairdo, click here.) Only young girls wore their hair loose, as long, loose hair on a woman was supposed to carry sexual connotations. When she turned 15 or 16, a girl would put her hair up, signaling her new status as a young woman. Married women and older women often covered their hair for the same reason. See my post on turbans.
The appropriation of statues from Ancient Greece and Rome, and works of art brought back by travelers returning from the Grand Tour, sparked a fashion for the "classical look" with curls and hairstyles resembling those statues and drawings, with hair worn in a simple chignon, with curls and ringlets softening the face or trailing over the shoulder.
Here, for example is a Roman bust from the 1st century AD — but it could be any Regency-era lady, couldn't it? This image is from this site, which has lots more fascinating information about hair in the Regency era.
Hair ornaments might be made of feathers, flowers (real or artificial), strings of pearls or beads, ribbons, bandeaux fancy combs or clips and tiaras. More excellent info here.
The giving and keeping of a lock of hair had huge personal significance in those days. When in Georgette Heyer's novel,The Convenient Marriage, Hero, the young heroine, loses a card game and is asked (by a villain) for a lock of her hair, it is much worse than if she had lost a large sum of money, because of the intimate personal significance that would be ascribed to the gesture.
During the Victorian and Edwardian eras woman's hair really came into its own. Hair was supposed to be thick and lush, and thus various methods were used to augment hair, not just for women whose hair had thinned due to illness or age. Hair thickening and strengthening tonics and applications were widely peddled. Hair extensions came into fashion, also "rats" which were pads of human hair, often saved hair from the wearer's hairbrush and made into a pad to heighten the hairdo.
Styles varied a great deal, from plain styles, parted and pulled into a neat bun or twist, to quite elaborate styles using curling tongs, "rats", extensions and more. Hair ornaments and combs also ranged from simple "push in" combs to elaborately decorated ones.
In the Victorian era people preserved locks of hair in lockets, under glass, like a painting — sometimes with a portrait of the loved one, locks of hair were clipped from dead people and kept as a memento. When Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, died in 1861, she sparked a mourning-jewelry trend by wearing his hair in a locket. It then became hugely fashionable to make jewelry out of the hair of dead loved ones — plain, braided or even made into decorative designs.
Houghton Library at Harvard has a vast hair collection, ranging from locks purporting to be from Shakespeare (not true) to some from other famous people. You can read more about it here.
Below are some Victorian-era mourning brooches, using hair of a loved one.
One of my favorite quotes from a TV production of Anne of Green Gables is when Anne, in her usual melodramatic fashion, asks her bosom friend Diana from whom she is being separated, "Wilt thou give me a lock of thy jet-black tresses?" To which Diana, less well-read than Anne, says, "But I don't have any black dresses." And Anne explains she means hair. Later she tells Marilla, “I’m going to sew it up in a little bag and wear it around my neck all my life.”
If you'd like to try creating a few Georgian or Victorian-era hairdos, watch these short helpful videos. Here's a Marie-Antoinette kind of hairdo, using a wig to get the required height. Or if Edwardian hair is to your taste, try this. Here's an informative video on creating an 18th century hair-do. And here's a Downton Abbey hairdos video.
Now, over to you: any of these styles of hair appeal to you? Do you like the idea of mourning brooches using hair or do you find it a bit gruesome?