Close Up and Personal: The Hairdresser in History

By Susan Vincent

This morning I stood in front of the mirror and tried to cut my own hair. As the weeks bite down and our locked-in lives drag by, I’m losing my definition. My short, sharp bob is shaggy and blurred, and my fringe hangs heavy. My hair is doing me no favours and I miss my hairdresser.

But it’s right that I’m not allowed to see him, both for his sake and my own. Hairdressing is close up and personal.

For better and for worse, hairdressing has a long history of being an intimate undertaking. Let’s take the bad stuff first. Being in close proximity to one another, a client and stylist share everything: body odours, the smells of each other’s breath, the hygiene of their hands, and the infections they pass between them. In 1744 for instance, Alexander Hamilton, a Scottish-born American, noted in his journal the ‘stinking breath’ of a barber in Philadelphia: ‘it almost made me sick’.

For this very reason, his compatriot Benjamin Franklin advocated self-shaving. In this way a man could avoid ‘the dirty fingers or bad Breath of a slovenly Barber’. More often though, such sentiments were rendered visually, cartoons and satires picturing for humour what everyone knew from unfunny experience. In this detail from Henry Bunbury’s Damn the Barber, you can see the client’s distaste as the barber’s fingers travel over his face, squeezing his nose and pushing to get the right angle and the skin taut.

The training standards of the modern profession are explicit about body care and cleanliness, though we’re all only human and our bodies betray the best of us. According to one celebrity hairdresser, spare deodorant is always kept in the loos, you can’t be in the job if you suffer from sweaty palms, and a stylist can use a hairdryer to discreetly waft away those accidental farts.

So these consequences of intimacy are unpleasant, but what about those that are painful or dangerous? Gossip did the rounds in the 1770s when Ann Barry, a Drury Lane actress, literally kicked her hairdresser down the stairs for ‘catching hold of her ear, in a hurry, with the hot pinching irons, instead of her curl’. Like the discomforts of barbering, this was a common enough experience that it was featured in satirical prints. The detail here, from Sketches in a Shaving Shop, shows a customer yelling in anguish as his inattentive barber pinches hard on his ear with the heated tongs – more branding than styling. 

 

Or closer to home chronologically, on that auspicious moment in 1957 when the hairdressing genius Vidal Sassoon first cut the hair of designer icon Mary Quant, he also cut her ear. This is a perpetual possibility in hairdressing, and ears bleed a lot. As one stylist describes it having nicked a client: I ‘ask my junior to run and get a tissue – tissue? Who am I kidding? You need a bloody Andrex factory to deal with a cut ear.’

With scissors and open blades constantly snipping, passing near the eyes, over the throat, at the neck’s nape, the potential for harm is astonishing. It’s no wonder that Sweeney Todd, the demonic (and fictional) barber of Fleet Street, has become a permanent fixture in our imaginations. 

 

Fortunately for us all though, the intimacy between a hairdresser and client is usually experienced positively. People put their trust in their stylist, and once they have found someone they like, will often go to considerable lengths to remain loyal. Let’s face it, we hardly ever get to see the same doctor, but we nearly always insist on our own hairdresser.

The established relationship, the trust, the touch and the grooming, all work to lower levels of reserve and further the work of intimacy. One way this is experienced is in the sharing of secrets, and many hairdressers self-identify as counsellors and life coaches for the people sitting in their chairs. But they also identify as raging gossips, a stereotypical character that has been ascribed to haircare professionals for hundreds, and maybe thousands, of years. (There’s a Roman joke about the garrulity of barbers.) As one woman warned in 1787, hairdressers,

having access to the ladies, frequently hear things in one house, which they carry to another. Ladies are too apt to converse with these fellows, and ask questions; and, for every piece of intelligence they communicate, they are rewarded with news in return; so, that many women are as much diverted with their slander, as embellished by their art.

From sharing – and spilling – secrets, it’s but a short step to an even more intimate relationship. The physical closeness of hairdressing and its pleasures of touch have also a long history of leading to sex. In his autobiography Sassoon wrote candidly about the liaisons that arose from proximity in the salon. At one point he held a staff meeting to address the problem of the stylists’ ‘overactive libidos’ and their dating of customers. ‘It was not quite ethical’, he suggested, ‘to seduce a married client’. In his memoirs, another stylist puts it both more memorably and more distastefully: ‘I was shagging half my clients. It was a great way to meet loads of up-for-it women. What better job for any young, healthy male with a voracious appetite for totty than to get intimate with twelve women a day?’

Once more, these ideas and stereotypes are found in visual sources from earlier centuries. Take a look at The Boarding-School Hair-Dresser, for instance, from 1786. The teenage girl sits with her legs apart, straddled by the hairdresser. She smiles with pleasure as he concentrates intently on the task in hand. 

 
Or what about A Hint to Married Men, a satirical print from 1794. Here the action takes places in the lady’s bedroom, as would most hairdresser home visits at the time – you can see the bed on the left. Apart from the location there is little in the image that is saucy or suggestive, but the accompanying verse makes for no doubt:

Ye Husbands who wish to live peaceable lives
Neer admit a Frizuer to the rooms of your Wives
When the Lady’s in disshabille, & a bed’s near
There is often two methods of dressing the hair

The last image is the most risqué. A Hint to the Husbands, or, The Dresser Properly Dressed was printed in London in 1777, at the height (pun intended) of the big hair craze and the Macaroni fashions that are exaggerated here for comic effect. The older husband, dressed conservatively in a rather old-style outfit, bursts in on his wife while she is having her elaborate hair arranged by her young, handsome and fashionable hairdresser. Note the long and doubtless phallic pin she holds between her fingers. Behind the husband an amused maid raises her fingers to form cuckold’s horns, while on the wall at the back hangs a portrait in which the female sitter is suggestively slipping her hand through her skirts.

And for a modern take, what about the following? 

 

So, hairdressing is certainly close up and personal. The relationship is – and always has been – occasionally dangerous, sometimes titillating, and almost always trusting. And for now, I’ve no option but to keep snipping at my fringe while my untended bob grows ever longer. But at least we’re spared the experience of poor Lady Sackville – not to mention poor Lady Sackville’s stylist – who in 1788 ‘expired as her hair was dressing – and without serious illness, to be sure, else they would not have been in public, or her hair dressing!’



Images

1. Untitled coloured engraving, no date (early nineteenth-century), Wellcome Library, London
2. Damn the Barber (detail), by Henry Bunbury (1750–1811), Wellcome Library, London
3. Sketches in a Shaving Shop (detail), by Richard Newton, 1791, Wellcome Library, London
4. Sweeney Todd, illustration from The String of Pearls, 1850, Wikimedia Commons
5. The Boarding-School Hair-Dresser, printed for Robert Sayer, 1786, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
6. A Hint to Married Men, published by Laurie & Whittle, 1794, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
7. A Hint to [the] Husbands, or, The Dresser, properly Dressed, printed for R. Sayer and J. Bennett, 1777, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
8. Untitled cartoon sourced from the internet, author unknown


References

 Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, ed. Carl Bridenbaugh (Williamsburg, 1948)
Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, ed. J.A. Leo Lemay and P.M. Zall (New York, 1986)
Shaun Lockes, Cutting Confidential: True Confessions and Trade Secrets of a Celebrity Hairdresser (London, 2007)
Vidal Sassoon, Vidal: The Autobiography (London, 2010)
Elizabeth Steele, Memoirs of Sophia Baddeley, 6 vols (London, 1787)
Cecil Aspinall-Oglander, Admiral’s Widow: Being the Life and Letters of the Hon. Mrs. Edward Boscawen from 1761 to 1805 (London, 1942)

 

Of hair and hairdressers in historic Japan by Debra Daley

The ways in which women of low social class earned a living in the 18th century, outside of prostitution and domestic service, always arouses my curiosity. During a recent research session, I came upon a print made around 1776 in Japan of a kabuki actor dressed as a kamiyui, a female hairdresser. It interested me to read that a woman who worked as a kamiyui was likely to make enough money to earn her own keep and to feed her husband and family and I decided to see if I could find out a little more about them.

The Actor Segawa Yujiro I as Osai, a Female Hairdresser. Katsukawa Shunsho, c.1776. Art Institute Chicago.

At the time that Segawa Yujiro posed for this print with boxes of combs, hairpins and oils, the freelance female hairdresser would have been a fairly novel role, I think. Until the heyday of the Edo period in the mid-18th century, Japanese women of means had tended to have their hair dressed by live-in maids. Women’s historical styles had hung down before being swept up and although hairstyling was subject to strictures that indicated a person’s social class, marital status and occupation – the samurai’s folded topknot, for instance – it had been relatively manageable at home for the middle classes.

Samurai. Hand-tinted photograph, 1881. Capital Collections, Edinburgh Libraries.

The indigenous faith of Shinto regards one’s body and physical attributes as a gift from the ancestors, handed down from generation to generation. In that sense, hair symbolises life and continuity – and maintaining it in good order was regarded as a devotional duty. In prehistoric times, it was said that combing the hair, using wooden combs infused with shamanic qualities, animated each strand’s spiritual energy, allowing it to act as a conduit of the divine.

Heian Period, Suihatsu Style. Image: The Kimono Gallery.pinterest.com Women of quality wore their hair long and unbound in the Heian period (794–1185). A greater quantity of hair intensified spiritual energy and earthly beauty as well as being a mark of elevated rank. The lower classes were obliged to cut their hair and tie it back in order not to impede their labours.

Lady Murasaki. Adachi Ginko, 1890. artellino.com

The words kami 神meaning ‘deity’ and kami 髪meaning ‘hair’ have a close relationship, which is reflected in the ceremonial treatment accorded to human hair in Japan. Peasants in ancient times burned their hair to encourage a good harvest. Hair was, and still is, offered at temples and shrines. The collected hair, broken combs and cut nails of the emperor or high-ranking persons used to be offered at official shrines and burned in a ritual fire. Even today, when a sumo wrestler retires from the ring, his topknot is ritually shorn and presented at the family altar or at a shrine.

For utter volume of votive hair, nothing beats the massive, somewhat creepy, rope of hair at Higashi Hongan-ji temple in Kyoto that was donated by female devotees in the late 19th century. The rope was used to hoist massive wooden beams during the temple’s reconstruction in 1895. Image: atlasobscura.com

Evidence of the supernatural associations of hair and its accoutrements have been found as early as the Jomon period (12,000–300 BCE), when pins fixed in the hair were thought to act as a kind of mystical lightning rod, which neutralised malevolent forces. The prophylactic power of these hair ornaments derived from the sacredness of the hair to which they were attached. (The defensive aspect of Japanese hair ornaments was expressed in more literal terms in late medieval times, when some forms of hairpins and combs were crafted to function as concealed weapons.)

Since hair was life and vitality and beauty, the loss of it was to be lamented – and nowhere more so than in the story of Japan’s most famous ghost, Lady Oiwa. She is the subject of the hugely popular kabuki play Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (The Strange Tale of Yotsuya), which made its debut in 1825. The play tells the story of Oiwa’s poisoning by her faithless husband and the vengeance exacted by her ghost. The moment in which she finds herself deprived of her hair is also the instant in which she loses her humanity. In the play’s centrepiece, she sits before her mirror plying her comb. As the poison in her body does its work, hanks of hair begin to fall from Oiwa’s head in great handfuls. By means of the ingenious stagecraft that is a hallmark of kabuki, the fallen hair piles up in an enormous heap and begins to bleed as Oiwa, in rage and despair, grasps at raven locks that were once a representation of beauty. Now, torn from her head, they symbolise her dehumanisation. Edo audiences watching Oiwa’s ghastly transformation would have recognised in it a twisted parody of the sensuous hair combing scenes that were a mainstay of kabuki romances. They would have noted, too, the significance of the use of a comb in this scene. The words ku, meaning suffering, and shi meaning death combine to make the Japanese word for comb – kushi.

Oiwa with disfigured face clasps a bloody clump of hair. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 1847. British Museum.

Unsurprisingly, the precautionary attitude toward hair and hair ornaments, that has endured through the ages in Japan, applies even more particularly to wooden combs. These objects have always been held in special regard – in Japan’s ancient origin-myth, the deity Izanagi broke off a tooth from the comb in his hair in order to light his way into the hall of the lower world in search of his consort – and people think of them with a certain amount superstitious circumspection even today. Numerous etiquette guides for foreigners in Japan advise against giving a comb as a gift. According to an account in D.C. Holtem’s 1922 study of Shinto, the source of this wariness can be found in a story concerning the vestal virgin of Ise. As she was about to leave to begin her long service at the Great Shrine, the emperor lodged a wakare no kushi, ‘the comb of separation’, in the vestal virgin’s hair, thus placing her under the taboo of comb and hair. The idea of ‘the comb of separation’ has lingered – nobody wants to receive an object that may cause anguish and sever them from their home.

Traditional Japanese combs (tsuge-gushi) are usually carved from durable boxwood and soaked in camellia oil to maintain their lustre. Camellia oil was also used to condition hair. Image: Daruma Archives, darumamuseum.blogspot.com

Combing the hair. Torii Kotondo, 1933. Japanese Art Open Database. The anti-static quality of boxwood allows the combs to impart a smooth sheen to the hair.

It is considered bad luck to pick up a cast-off comb for fear of taking on another person’s suffering. If you do find a comb, you must compensate for keeping it by discarding one of your possessions in its stead. To allay its mysterious workings, a comb must be treated with respect. There is, in fact, an annual Comb Festival in Kyoto, which honours the service that these objects have performed. Women in traditional dress bring their used combs and hairpins to the Yasui Shrine where a memorial ceremony is held to express gratitude to them. Prayers are said for the spirits of the worn-out combs, before they are burned in a purifying fire.

Women parading in the Kyoto Comb Festival. Image: Daruma Archives, darumamuseum.blogspot.co.uk

Long, unbound hair prevailed among the upper echelons until the Edo period (1603–1868), when the tied-back style favoured by common women began to spread among courtesans and entertainers in the pleasure districts – the ‘floating world’ – that had been set up in Edo (Tokyo), Kyoto and Osaka. As time passed, courtesans tinkered with the tied-back styles. The look became increasingly elaborate and the style (shimada) needed to be secured with large numbers of pins and combs. Hair ornaments, known collectively by the word for hairpin, kanzashi, were lavishly deployed.

Portrait of the courtesan Tsukioka of Hyogo-ya. Chokosai Eisho, c.1790. Japanese Art Open Database.

The shimada style became popular in the Edo period. Image: Daruma Archives, darumamuseum.blogspot.co.uk

The upswept shimada style, popularised by the exuberant courtesans of the floating world during the 17th and 18th centuries, exposed the subtle eroticism of the nape of the neck and encouraged a way of dressing, known as nukiemon, in which the collar of the kimono is draped to reveal the naked nape.

Image: Daruma Archives, darumamuseum.blogspot.co.uk 

When local townswomen and their daughters began to adopt the style, and to dress in the manner of the conspicuously fashionable courtesans, moralists, the 17th-century Confucian scholar Kaibara Ekken for one, began to mutter among themselves. They did not approve of the wives of merchants and artisans going about in floating-world hairstyles and apparel tainted with sexual connotations. But women were charmed by the vivid courtesan style. It was a trend that they were determined to follow.

The commercial expansion of Edo society offered greater opportunities for women as independent wage-earners. While women of the samurai class were expected to dedicate themselves to their husbands, this kind of subservience was not practicable for lower-class women, who were obliged to earn money. They did so in various capacities as wet nurses, seamstresses and general servants in the houses of samurai and wealthy merchants. Eventually, when the opportunity arose, many of them became hairdressers. Shimada styles were complicated, requiring pads and frames, oiling and folding, weaving and pinning, to achieve the required shape. Difficult to create and to maintain, these styles were a financial godsend to women with hairdressing skills. 

Historian Shiho Imai reports that the first self-employed female hairdressers were spotted out and about in Osaka in 1764, catering mostly to women of the pleasure district, but by the turn of the decade, flocks of entrepreneurial hairdressers were going from house to house to tend to clients of the artisan and merchant classes. Their clients appreciated the convenience of having a style set that could last for a fortnight as long as they were careful to prop their heads on a wooden neck rest when they turned in for the night.

The Oiran Yoso-oi seated at her toilette. Kitagawa Utamaro, c.1799. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

  

Hairdresser. Katsukawa Shuncho, c.1780-1795. Harvard Art Museums.

Hairdresser (from series Twelve types of women's handicraft). Kitagawa Utamaro, c.1797-98. Google Art Project.

By the 1780s, female hairdressers were doing brisk business in Kyoto and Edo; some had even opened their own shops. It was a display of independence that offended the keepers of public morals, who began to rail against these uppity coiffeuses, disparaging them for dressing with a flamboyance that was not appropriate to their station – a reproach also directed, I might add, at ladies’ maids in Georgian England, when they went out costumed in their mistress’s cast-off clothes. 

Edo’s female hairdressers were castigated for consorting with harlots and actors and, more ominously, given the deteriorating economy of the time, for encouraging extravagance and wastefulness by luring merchants’ wives and daughters into squandering money on non-essential fancy hairstyles. This latter accusation proved the sticking point. In the annus horribilis of 1787, Japan suffered a series of floods, which devastated crops and led to severe food shortages and subsequent riots. The bakufu, the military government of the time, imposed a policy of economic austerity and a series of reforms that prohibited, among other interdictions, the use of barbers and hairdressers, who were accused of corrupting public morals.

But within three years the hairdressers were back in business and more popular than ever to no one’s surprise. In a society where dishevelled and uncombed hair was a defining feature of malevolence and disgrace, the hairdresser’s work was practically godly, even if she herself was still regarded as common.

Ghost. Shibata Zeshin, 19th century. Los Angeles County Museum. Ghosts (yurei) are often depicted with bedraggled, tangled locks.

By the mid-19th century, more than 1,400 female hairdressers were in business in Edo alone, and they were so successful that the phrase kamiyui no teishu ­– ‘the hairdresser's husband’ – fell into general use to describe a man who lived off a woman’s income. That these hairdressers’ earnings could match those of tradesmen remains a feat to be saluted, especially in the oppressive lower-class world of 19th-century Japan.

Sources

Karen Brazell, James T. Araki. Traditional Japanese Theatre: An Anthology of Plays. Columbia University Press, 1998.

D.C. Holtom. The Political Philosophy of Modern Shinto, a study of the state religion of Japan. Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1922.

Ed Jacob. Japanese Combs and Hair Ornaments. darumamuseum.blogspot.com

Kazuko Ide. Article on tsuge-gushi, Japan Times, April 24, 1999.

Shiho Imai. The Independent Working Woman as Deviant in Tokugawa Japan, 1600-1867. Michigan Feminist Studies, University of Michigan, 2002.

Na-Young Choi. Symbolism of hairstyles in Korea and Japan. Asian Folklore Studies, Wonkwang University, 2006.

On traditional crafts: Tokyo Metropolitan Government. sangyo-rodo.metro.tokyo.jp