An independent, source-led cultural history of how women and girls have cut, dressed, covered, coloured, curled, straightened, braided and understood their hair — from antiquity to the present, with Britain and Ireland at its centre. 2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/ Claire McDonald 2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/objects/curling-tongs/

Heated metal pincers for curling and waving hair — a tool with a history of more than three thousand years, from Egyptian bronze to the salon Marcel iron.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/objects/hair-dryer/

From a stoneware bottle of boiling water to the row of humming salon hoods — how drying, the slowest part of every set, was turned into a machine.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/objects/home-perm-kit/

A box of lotions, rods and papers that brought the permanent wave out of the salon and into the kitchen — and, in some kits, onto children’s heads.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/people/antoine-de-paris/

Antoni Cierplikowski, a Polish-born hairdresser who became “Antoine” of Paris — a celebrity salon owner long credited with the first fashionable ladies’ bob, a claim still without contemporary proof.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/people/annie-malone/

Founder of the Poro hair-care company and its training network — a pioneer of Black women’s enterprise often overshadowed in popular memory.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/people/christina-jenkins/

Ohio cosmetologist who patented a method of weaving added hair onto a client's own hair in 1952, called it the Hair-Weev, and spent four decades teaching it — a founder of modern sewn-in weaving, not the inventor of added hair.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/people/jd-okhai-ojeikere/

Nigerian photographer whose Hairstyles series, begun in 1968, is one of the richest visual records of women’s hair in any country — made in the years after independence from British rule, and now held in London as well as Paris and New York.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/people/karl-nessler/

The Black Forest-born hairdresser who, trading in London as “Charles Nestlé”, patented a heated permanent-waving process in 1909 — then rebuilt his business in New York after wartime internment.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/people/kwame-brathwaite/

Harlem photographer whose pictures of the Grandassa Models and the “Naturally” fashion shows made natural hair a visible ideal of beauty in the early 1960s, and whose images reached Black publications in Britain at the time.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/people/marcel-grateau/

The Paris hairdresser whose name became the Marcel wave — a heated-iron wave worn for half a century. The technique’s fame is well documented; much of his life, and the patents often credited to him, are not.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/people/marjorie-stewart-joyner/

Beautician, teacher and Walker company executive who patented a permanent-waving machine in 1928 and spent half a century training hairdressers — and organising them.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/people/rose-meta-morgan/

Harlem beautician and entrepreneur whose Rose Meta House of Beauty was described as the largest Black beauty salon in the world, and who helped found a Black-owned bank in Harlem.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/people/vidal-sassoon/

London hairdresser whose precision, geometric cutting made the cut itself the style in the 1960s — and, for some clients, replaced the weekly shampoo and set with a cut every few weeks.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/stories/age-and-hair/

Who decides how a girl’s hair is worn, when that power passes to her, and what happens to it again in old age — a history told across a lifetime rather than a decade.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/stories/black-british-hair/

From suitcases packed with hot combs to Tottenham hair businesses, Brixton salons, Alexandra Palace hair shows and the Halo Code — a history of hair in Black British communities since 1945, told as skill, trade, family time and pleasure as well as struggle.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/stories/from-kitchen-to-salon/

Most hair work has always been done unpaid, at home, by mothers, sisters, friends and women themselves. This essay follows that labour into the paid salon — a trade, a workplace, a women’s business and a meeting place — mainly in Britain and Ireland, with American and diasporic comparison.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/stories/how-trends-travel/

From engraved coiffure plates to TikTok, each new medium changed how fast a hairstyle could be seen. This essay follows the channels (prints, photographs, film, fan magazines, trade journals, television and platforms) and asks what evidence could ever show that a famous head caused many others to follow.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/stories/rules-about-hair/

Prisons, poorhouses, hospitals, kitchens, factories, schools and the army have all written rules about women’s and girls’ hair. This essay compares what the rules said with how they were enforced, separates genuine task-specific safety from demands for a particular look, and asks whose natural hair was treated as the problem — mainly in Britain, from the 1840s to today.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/stories/technology-and-chemistry/

Taps, shampoo, tongs, dryers, perm machines, relaxers, synthetic dyes, plastics and fibres all changed what could be done with hair. This essay asks what each one cost in time, labour and money — and who could afford it — mainly in Britain, with American comparison.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/styles/afro/

Coily hair worn in its own texture and shaped into a rounded form — a powerful image of pride and politics, and also a style people wore for many other reasons.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/styles/beehive/

A tall, rounded dome of backcombed hair — one of the few styles with a named, dated creator, and a lesson in how a magazine commission could become a decade’s silhouette.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/styles/bob/

A family of short cuts whose meanings kept changing — from a 1920s statement to 1960s geometry to a style so familiar it now barely registers.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/styles/braids/

One of the oldest ways of dressing hair — and not one style but many, from a school plait tied with a ribbon to cornrows, box braids and ancient braided wigs.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/styles/bun/

Hair gathered, coiled and pinned — a form that has meant imperial elegance, respectable adulthood, workplace safety and, lately, deliberate messiness.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/styles/locs/

Rope-like strands formed as hair is allowed or encouraged to mat — worn across many cultures and faiths, and still penalised by some school and workplace rules.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/styles/ponytail/

Hair gathered and tied at the back of the head — practical for school and sport, a symbol of 1950s teenagers, and a style whose tightness matters.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/styles/victory-rolls/

Hair rolled high at the front and pinned — the style most people now picture for the 1940s, and one of the most revived.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/styles/wigs/

Added hair is part of hair culture, not "fake hair" — from ancient plaited wigs to Victorian switches, 1960s fashion wigs, extensions and wigs worn through illness.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/techniques/permanent-waving/

Changing the shape of hair until it grows out — from hours attached to a heated machine to a cold-wave kit on the kitchen table.

2026-11-12T00:00:00Z https://hairfashionhistory.com/techniques/pressing/

Straightening curly and coily hair with a heated comb, and later with chemical relaxers and smoothing treatments — skilled work with a long, contested history.