Wig

History

Ancient and medieval use

In Egyptian society men and women commonly had clean-shaven or close-cropped hair and often wore wigs. The ancient Egyptians created the wig to shield shaved, hairless heads from the sun. They also wore the wigs on top of their hair using beeswax and resin to keep the wigs in place. Wealthy Egyptians would wear elaborate wigs and scented head cones of animal fat on top of their wigs. Other ancient cultures, including the Assyrians, Phoenicians, Jews in ancient Israel and Judea, Greeks, and Romans, also used wigs as an everyday fashion.

Examples of ancient wigs

In China, the popularization of the wig started in the Spring and Autumn period.

In Japan, the upper classes started wearing wigs before the Nara period.

In Korea, gache were popular among women during the Goryeo dynasty until they were banned in the late 18th century.

Medieval Europe, 16th and 17th centuries

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the use of wigs fell into disuse in the West for a thousand years until they were revived in the 16th century as a means of compensating for hair loss or improving one's personal appearance. Several cultural and religious factors contributed to the decline of wigs during this period. Christian ideals emphasized modesty and austerity in appearance, and elaborate cosmetic practices such as wigs were often discouraged. Women typically covered their hair with veils, wimples, or other head coverings, especially after marriage, which further reduced the need for artificial hairpieces. Although full wigs were rare, some limited use of hairpieces and false hair did occur. Archaeological evidence and historical records suggest that extensions or artificial tresses were occasionally used to enhance hairstyles, particularly among elites. In some cases these hairpieces were attached to caps or nets rather than constructed as complete wigs. When wigs were used in the medieval period, they could consist of hair attached to leather caps, sometimes made from human or animal hair. These early forms were often poorly fitted and were not widely adopted. They also served a practical purpose: the unhygienic conditions of the time meant that hair attracted head lice, a problem that could be much reduced if natural hair were shaved and replaced with a more easily de-loused artificial hairpiece. Fur hoods were also used in a similar preventive fashion.

Royal patronage was crucial to the revival of the wig. Queen Elizabeth I famously wore a red wig, tightly and elaborately curled in a "Roman" style, while among men King Louis XIII (1601–1643) started to pioneer wig-wearing in 1624 when he had prematurely begun to bald. This fashion was largely promoted by his son and successor Louis XIV (1638–1715), which contributed to its spread in Europe and European-influenced countries in the 1660s. Wig-wearing remained a dominant style among men for about 140 years until the change of dress in the 1790s which was affected by the French Revolution (1789–1799).

Perukes or periwigs for men were introduced into the English-speaking world with other French styles when Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, following a lengthy exile in France. These wigs were shoulder-length or longer, imitating the long hair that had become fashionable among men since the 1620s. Their use soon became popular in the English court. The London diarist Samuel Pepys recorded the day in 1665 that a barber had shaved his head and that he tried on his new periwig for the first time, but in a year of plague he was uneasy about wearing it:

3rd September 1665: Up, and put on my coloured silk suit, very fine, and my new periwig, bought a good while since, but darst not wear it because the plague was in Westminster when I bought it. And it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done as to periwigs, for nobody will dare to buy any haire for fear of the infection? That it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague.

Wigs were not without other drawbacks, as Pepys noted on March 27, 1663:

I did go to the Swan; and there sent for Jervas my old periwig-maker and he did bring me a periwig; but it was full of nits, so as I was troubled to see it (it being his old fault) and did send him to make it clean.

With wigs virtually obligatory garb for men with social rank, wigmakers gained considerable prestige. A wigmakers' guild was established in France in 1665, a development soon copied elsewhere in Europe. Their job was a skilled one as 17th century wigs were extraordinarily elaborate, covering the back and shoulders and flowing down the chest; not surprisingly, they were also extremely heavy and often uncomfortable to wear. Such wigs were expensive to produce. The best examples were made from natural human hair. The hair of horses and goats was often used as a cheaper alternative.

Several contemporary writings which have survived noted that some viewed men who wore wigs as looking deformed and emasculated. It especially attracted disapproval from Puritans, and during times of plague, it was said that wigs were made of hair of plague victims.

Wigs required cleaning using fuller's earth, and the powder used to freshen it was made from low grade flour and scented with pomatum.

Examples of wigs in the 16th and 17th centuries

18th century

In the 18th century, men's wigs were powdered to give them their distinctive white or off-white color. Women in the 18th century did not wear wigs, but wore a coiffure supplemented by artificial hair or hair from other sources. Powdered wigs (men) and powdered natural hair with supplemental hairpieces (women) became essential for full dress occasions and continued in use until almost the end of the 18th century.

The elaborate form of wigs worn at the coronation of George III in 1761 was lampooned by William Hogarth in his engraving Five Orders of Periwigs. Powdering wigs and extensions was messy and inconvenient, and the development of the naturally white or off-white powderless wig (made of horsehair) for men made the retention of wigs in everyday court dress a practical possibility. By 1765, wig-wearing went out of fashion except for some occupational groups such as coachmen and lawyers. During this period, people tended to simply wear their natural hair, styled and powdered to resemble a wig. However, the trend revived extravagantly during the Macaroni period of the 1770s. Women mainly powdered their hair grey, or blue-ish grey, and from the 1770s onwards never bright white like men. Wig powder was made from finely ground starch that was scented with orange flower, lavender, or orris root. Wig powder was occasionally colored violet, blue, pink or yellow, but was most often off-white.

By the 1780s, young men were setting a fashion trend by lightly powdering their natural hair, as women had already done from the 1770s onwards. After 1790, both wigs and powder were reserved for older, more conservative men, and were in use by ladies being presented at court. After 1790, English women seldom powdered their hair.

In 1795, the British prime minister William Pitt the Younger levied a tax on hair powder of one guinea per year. This tax effectively caused the demise of both the fashion for wigs and powder. Granville Leveson-Gower, in Paris during the winter of 1796, at the height of the Thermidorian Directory, noted "The word citoyen seemed but very little in use, and hair powder being very common, the appearance of the people was less democratic than in England."

Among women in the French court of Versailles in the mid-to-late 18th century, large, elaborate and often themed wigs (such as the stereotypical "boat poufs") were in vogue. These combed-up hair extensions were often very heavy, weighted down with pomades, powders, and other ornamentation. In the late 18th century these coiffures (along with many other indulgences in court life) became symbolic of the decadence of the French nobility, and for that reason quickly became out of fashion from the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789.

During the 18th century, men's wigs became smaller and more formal with several professions adopting them as part of their official costumes. This tradition survives in a few legal systems. They are routinely worn in various countries of the Commonwealth. Until 1823, bishops of the Church of England and Church of Ireland wore ceremonial wigs. The wigs worn by barristers are in the style favoured in the late eighteenth century. Judges' wigs, in everyday use as court dress, are short like barristers' wigs (although in a slightly different style), but for ceremonial occasions judges and also senior barristers (KCs) wear full-bottomed wigs.

In the 18th century, wigmaking was a craft guild in multiple cities. The guilds, government, and others were constantly concerned about quality. The Lyon Wigmaker Guild petitioned local magistrates to uphold statutes banning bleached human hair, as well as wild goat and lamb hair. The guild officers claimed that the process of bleaching damaged the hair too much, thereby forcing a wigmaker to sell a faulty product to consumers. As for the wild goat and lamb hair, they claimed it was too coarse to style. 18th century French wigmakers used an interesting technique to ensure that the hair retained moisture: baking hair into dough. In Paris, gingerbread bakers would routinely bake hair dough for wigmakers, although in other French cities, it was not necessarily gingerbread. Taxes on hair dough baking were proposed in 1705. In Grenoble, wigmakers complained that such tax obligations "destroy the liberty of commerce; because no baker is obliged to bake wigmakers' hair dough, instead doing it for them as a courtesy."

Examples of 18th century wigs

19th and 20th centuries

Due to the association with ruling classes in European monarchies, the wearing of wigs as a symbol of social status was largely abandoned in the newly created republics, the United States and France, by the start of the 19th century, though formal court dress of European monarchies still required a powdered wig or long powdered hair tied in a queue until the accession of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) to the throne as emperor in 1804.

In the United States, only four presidents, from John Adams (1735–1826) to James Monroe (1758–1831), wore curly powdered wigs tied in a queue according to the old-fashioned style of the 18th century while in office, though Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) wore a powdered wig only rarely and stopped wearing a wig entirely shortly after becoming president in 1801. John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) also wore a powdered wig in his youth, but he abandoned this fashion while serving as the U.S. Minister to Russia (1809–1814), long before his accession to the presidency in 1825, and William Henry Harrison (1773–1841) wore a powdered wig during his early military service in the U.S. Army in the 1790s. Unlike them, the first president, George Washington (1732–1799), did not wear a wig; instead, he powdered, curled and tied in a queue his own long hair.

In some parts of the countryside the wearing of wigs lasted well into the 19th century. In Saint-Gaudens in Southern France wigs were worn until the 1840s, while the German scholar Ferdinand Justi noted in his work on Hessian traditional costumes that as a child he had known an elderly farmer who wore a pigtail in the old Prussian military style. "Surely", Justi noted, "the last example of this invention of Frederick William I." In fact the Electorate of Hesse had abolished the military wig only in 1821, less than three decades earlier.

Women's wigs developed in a somewhat different way. They were worn from the 18th century onwards, although at first only surreptitiously. Full wigs in the 19th and early 20th century were not fashionable. They were often worn by old ladies who had lost their hair.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century hairdressers in England and France did a brisk business supplying postiches, or pre-made small wiglets, curls, and false buns to be incorporated into the hairstyle. The use of postiches did not diminish even as women's hair grew shorter in the decade between 1910 and 1920, but they seem to have gone out of fashion during the 1920s. In the 1960s a new type of synthetic wig was developed using a modacrylic fiber which made wigs more affordable. Reid-Meredith was a pioneer in the sales of these types of wigs.

Presidents of the United States in powdered wigs Change of hairstyle fashion as a part of formal court dress

21st century

The art of wigs became a billion dollar industry in the 21st century. Three main processes happen within the industry: the collection of material, manufacturing, and distribution. India is the main source of hair. It has been reported from time to time that for global human hair trade, women from the ASEAN region are being exploited. Hair from this region has a significant commercial value in the international market. Particularly in India, the women are forced by their husbands into selling their hair, and slum children were being tricked into "having their heads shaved in exchange for toys". Scrap pickers are another source of hair in India, these people find hair in miscellaneous places such as hair brushes, clothes, or in the trash. While manufacturing and processing mainly takes place in China, where the hair is sorted through and constructed into wigs, the final product exported abroad, with the top countries being the United States and the United Kingdom.

Official use

In the United Kingdom and some Commonwealth nations, special wigs are also worn by barristers, judges and certain parliamentary and municipal or civic officials as a symbol of the office.

Hong Kong barristers and judges continue to wear wigs as part of court dress as a legacy of the court system from the time of British rule.

In July 2007, judges in New South Wales, Australia, voted to discontinue the wearing of wigs in the NSW Court of Appeal.

New Zealand lawyers and judges have ceased to wear wigs except for ceremonial occasions, such as when newly qualified lawyers are called to the bar.

In Ireland, lawyers and judges have ceased to wear wigs in 2011.

In Canada lawyers and judges do not wear wigs.

Entertainment

A number of celebrities, including Donna Summer, Dolly Parton, Sia, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Diana Ross & The Supremes, Tina Turner and Raquel Welch, popularized wigs. Cher has worn all kinds of wigs over her long career, from blonde to black, and curly to straight. They may also be worn for fun as part of fancy dress (costume wearing), when they can be of outlandish color or made from tinsel. They are quite common at Halloween, when "rubber wigs" (solid bald cap–like hats, shaped like hair), are sold at some stores. They can be used as part of a costume to dress up as a fictional character, historical character or celebrity.

Wigs are used in film, theater, and television. In the Japanese film and television genre Jidaigeki, wigs are used extensively to alter appearance to reflect the Edo period when most stories take place. Only a few actors starring in big-budgeted films and television series will grow their hair so that it may be cut to the appropriate hair style, and forgo using a wig.

In the theater, especially on Broadway, wigs are used to give a performer a fixed character. Nearly all women and many men do so not only for character design, but also to cover their microphone packs. Often the microphone pack goes on the actor's head, mainly to efficiently facilitate quick changes.

An actor not wearing a wig needs to change their look every time they go on stage. The wig helps solidify the character's design; natural hair is different day to day.

Convenience

Wigs are worn by some people on a daily or occasional basis in everyday life. This is sometimes done for reasons of convenience, since wigs can be styled ahead of time. A common practice of wigs for convenience is called protective styling. Many use wigs to avoid damage to their natural tresses, or to create styles that may not be possible otherwise. They are also worn by individuals who are experiencing hair loss for medical reasons (most commonly cancer patients who are undergoing chemotherapy, or those who are suffering from alopecia areata).

Some men who crossdress as women wear wigs in different styles to make their hair seem more feminine.

Merkin

A merkin is a pubic wig often worn as a decorative item or for theatrical and fashion purposes. They are sometimes viewed as erotic and some designs are meant for entertainment or as a form of comedy.

Image gallery

Examples of contemporary wigs