John Galliano graduated from Central Saint Martins in 1984, and eight years later Lee Alexander McQueen followed suit. Two of their collections from the mid- nineties, Galliano’s Princess Lucretia (spring/summer 94/95) and McQueen’s Highland Rape (autumn/winter 95/96) use women’s bodies as a medium beyond clothing. Both use historical narratives to emotional and aesthetic effect, and both are fascinated with hierarchical power dynamics and violence against women.

Galliano’s show was built on an invented fairy-tale narrative, inspired by a Vanity Fair article which detailed a DNA connection between the Romanovs and the Duke of Edinburgh. Galliano’s Princess Lucretia runs away from the 1860s crinolines and hoops skirts of her Russian upbringing to Scotland. On her escape train, she meets a polka-dotty duke and duchess, who introduce her to parties. She becomes “naughty”, drinking, smoking and gambling, before falling in love with a lord and living happily ever after in reimaginings of Madeleine Vionnet’s bias-cut dresses. This magical realist narrative allows for the corseted, extremely unwieldy shapes of the mid-nineteenth century to metamorphose into the lithe and figure-hugging silks of the nineteen twenties in one performance.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxtK-jqBBrf/

Galliano’s show also follows the narrative of the seeming emancipation of a young woman’s body after the First World War. However, the ideal boyish figure of the twenties was by no means less restricted. Though it took up less space than the hoop-skirted silhouettes we see at the beginning of the show, the binding of breasts and pushing down of hips through corselets was hardly comfortable or natural. By the nineties, these techniques of reducing the appearance of secondary sexual characteristics had been internalised through dieting, exercise, and, at times, starvation. Where Galliano’s show foregrounded a fairy tale narrative featuring the recognisable historical shapes of crinolines and bias-cuts, McQueen’s story was far more abstract. His historical starting point was the eighteenth-century Jacobite rebellion, reinvented as a tale of masculine English domination and violation of a Scotland that is codified as feminine and natural.

In Highland Rape, the beginning of McQueen’s fascination with what Stephen Seely terms the “becoming non-human of the wearer’s body” is visible. Such de-humanising has long been used as a method of patriarchal control, as evidenced in the consideration of undergarments from the 1860s through the 1920s. For Seely, however, this can also “problematize the privileged Western binaries of human/animal, organic/inorganic, real/artifice, and male/female.” These binaries are made evident in the lace that McQueen features throughout the collection. At times, it is a matte pale blue, that trains off in tendrils down the model’s legs, resembling a cornflower meadow turned upside down. At others, it is painted over with iridescence, like the scales of a fish. Later, the lace becomes dark green and seems almost moss-like, matching up with the clumps of scrub which decorate the edges of the catwalk, through which the photographers’ cameras leer, like predators waiting to pounce.

Using rape as metaphor in art is uncomfortable and risky, particularly when that art involves real women’s bodies in varying states of nudity as part of the performance. When it was suggested to McQueen that the collection was misogynous, he was deeply upset, stating that he was “very close” to his oldest sister who had been abused by her husband. “All you want to do is make women look stronger (…),” he said, “I want to portray the way society still sees women in some ways, not the way I see women.” McQueen’s focus on personal experience over public narrativization is key in Highland Rape, but it is also problematised by his use of lesser-known models who, given the precarious nature of their occupation, might not have able to give full consent in the use of their bodies in the show.

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This was not the case for Princess Lucretia. In Catwalk, we see Galliano directing Kate Moss backstage. The tiered blue skirt billows out behind her as she runs, her torso emerging childlike from the top, tiny in comparison to the sea that swallows the rests of her body. The name “Lucretia” has obvious connotations of rape (the tale of the Roman woman’s assault has been retold many times), but there are other signs of vulnerability. The soundtrack of Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé is cut through with the sound howling wolves, the threat of the traditional wolf whistle transferred from man to animal. Galliano instructs Moss that, when she hears the wolves, to “stop” in order “to make the dress go really forward”. The suggested whiplash of fear in her heart is communicated through the momentum of the dress.

In both shows, the models wear matted hair extensions, mismatched and straggly. These accentuate their jerky and uncomfortable movements, adding to the sense of the physical suffering they have endured. Where Galliano’s models look back behind them as they come out onto the runway, the women in McQueen’s show stare at the audience as they return. Certain models were given sclera contacts lenses which cover the whole eye and make it black. These empty-seeming eyes evoke the blank stare of a survivor’s dissociation. The lenses also act like black mirrors, reflecting the onlookers’ faces. These models glare back at the audience, challenging them to examine themselves and their assumptions.

By Alexandra Sive

For many, the arrival of winter brings with it a longing for summer. The cold has a way of expunging memories of sweaty afternoons spent with a cold drink pressed to the forehead in a desperate attempt to cool down. In a playful confrontation of this sensorial paradox, Maison Martin Margiela’s Spring/Summer ’06 collection, shown just as winter crept into Paris in 2005, features necklaces, earrings, bracelets and belts strung with coloured ice cubes. Continuing a process that no doubt began with a hairdryer backstage, the bright stage lights and the heat from the bodies of the audience and models melt the ice so that the dye – green, purple, blue and pink – runs down the models’ skin and seeps into their white clothes.

Jewellery created from ice is an amusing play on the senses. Ice can have the transparency or the sparkle of a gemstone and feels cool to the touch just like jewellery. For decades, hip-hop artists have used ice as a metaphor for diamond jewellery in reference to the optic and haptic crossovers. The obvious difference is that ice cubes, unlike diamonds, do not last forever. The water, artificially and temporarily frozen, therefore speaks to the artifice and temporality of fashion. Both the ice and the clothes are visually altered as time unfolds before the audience.

This visible change recalls Margiela’s ‘9/4/1615’ exhibition held in 1997 at Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, for which the clothes on display had been sprayed with living mould, yeast or bacteria. While the decay occurred at a slower rate than the melting of ice, each visitor would see a slightly different stage of development. Caroline Evans notes that each piece, recreated from the designer’s archive and decomposing before an audience, is ‘saturated with complex historical meanings’, hinting at Martin Margiela’s own complex relationship with history and time.

Martin Margiela’s personal and professional archive, unpacked in the 2020 documentary Martin Margiela: In His Own Words, is a testament to his reverence for the past. This obsessive accumulation and preservation of objects might appear at odds with his reputation for deconstruction. Rather than being rooted in any sense of destructive violence, however, his deconstructive practice was based in ‘care for the material object and sartorial techniques’, as noted by Alison Gill. In this way, Margiela’s particular brand of deconstruction can be considered much closer to conservation.

Watching pure white fabric stained haphazardly, like an ice lolly dripped on a cotton dress, has the potential to be jarring. Instead, something in the wet, candy-coloured mess created is enlivening and joyful. The grotesque mixture of melted ice and oil sticks the models’ hair to their skin and causes their makeup to bleed, engaging the audience’s haptic imagination. The streetcast models, who smile and dance, amplify this effect with their relatability. Just as Elizabeth Wilson notes that grunge recalls glamour, here, the grotesque is inviting. The effect, according to Vogue, is ‘a hot display of grittily glamourous womanhood [that could] reduce any man to a pool of water’. Unlike Shalom Harlow, dancing in distress as her dress was spray-painted by robot arms at Alexander McQueen’s show seven years earlier, Margiela’s models exude cool acceptance as the recently frozen water spreads across their skin. Rather than destruction, or even creation, this is something more passive and voyeuristic: decay, or, as Evans described the process at the exhibition, ‘decay without revulsion’.

By Lucy Corkish

Sources

Maison Margiela SPRING 2006 READY-TO-WEAR on Vogue Runway: Words by Sarah Mower, Photographs by Marcio Madeira (https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-2006-ready-to-wear/maison-martin-margiela)

Caroline Evans, ‘The Golden Dustman: A critical evaluation of the work of Martin Margiela and a review of Martin Margiela: Exhibition (9/4/1615)’, Fashion Theory 2:1 (1998), pp. 73-93

Elizabeth Wilson, ‘A Note on Glamour’, Fashion Theory, 11:1 (2007), 95-108

Reiner Holzemer, Martin Margiela: In His Own Words, cinematographer Toon Illegems (2020; London: Dogwoof)

Alison Gill, ‘Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Re-assembled Clothes’, Fashion Theory 2:1 (1998), pp. 25-49

When thinking about jewellery, as I often do, my mind wanders to the nineteenth century legends. Famous jewellers such as Cartier, Fabergé and Bvlgari all rose to prominence in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. As the decades passed, each of these jewellery houses consistently reimagined the classic designs synonymous with its reputation (the panthère, the egg and the snake, respectively). However, another house also gained fame in the nineteenth century: Lalique. Founded in 1888 by René Lalique, the house created immensely popular jewellery throughout the end of the nineteenth century, as customers were drawn to Lalique’s novel approach to the relationship between the individual and nature.

Lalique had an extraordinary ability to render pieces with complimentary elements of naturalism and mysticism while also daring to create with materials no one else saw fit to use. However, though Lalique was both a jeweller and a glassmaker, his glassware technique remains far more recognized today than his jewellery. While the house still creates some jewellery, the pieces Lalique conceived in the late-nineteenth century are infinitely more iconic.

Born in 1860 in Aÿ-en-Champagne in the Marne region of France, Lalique spent his childhood in the countryside, an element of his life that inspired the naturalistic elements of his jewellery designs. He then studied at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, after which he became a freelance jewellery designer for famous houses such as Cartier, Boucheron and Gariod. By the 1880s, Lalique had catapulted to the forefront of the jewellery industry. Considered the master of the Art Nouveau style, René Lalique revolutionized jewellery design in his use of unconventional materials and the intricate patterns of his creations.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BbRkksBBwLs/?igshid=1a3litxth31l2

https://www.instagram.com/p/BZ6JFfyhKI6/?igshid=5zdnxekbgqq0

The style of Art Nouveau gained popularity in the late 1800s. Concurrently, this time period saw a rise in demand for elaborate jewellery and pieces in ‘The Garland Style,’ a technique that emphasised natural motifs and delicate, flowing lines. The graceful, sweeping designs aimed to compliment fashions of the time. Necklaces rose in favour, particularly chokers layered atop longer necklaces, such as strands of pearls, égligé pendants, or lavalieres. Brooches, corsages and tiaras were often designed to look like floral bouquets or vines of foliage.

Lalique took these trends a step further and incorporated elements of the mythical into his naturalistic designs. He frequently used motifs of the female figure, flora, and fauna in his creations; his favourite motifs included women with dragonfly wings and women’s faces imposed on varieties of flowers.

He also made use of materials previously unused in the jewellery industry, including horn, semi-precious stones, enamel, ivory and glass. Rather than using large diamonds to pull focus, as was popular at the time, Lalique preferred stones such as cornelian, tourmaline, bloodstone, chrysoberyl, coral and ivory. He designed many pieces for actress Sarah Bernhardt. In the photograph below she wears a stunning headdress with jewelled flowers on either side of a large crown. Many of the pieces he designed for Bernhardt were stage jewellery, and she eventually became one of his patrons. Lalique became known for arranging his materials in patterns that favoured originality over outright ostentation.

Though he had used glass in his jewellery designs, Lalique eventually shifted his focus entirely to glass at the turn of the twentieth century, creating works in the novel, more minimalist Art Deco style. He partnered with perfumer François Coty, creating beautiful perfume bottles, before turning his attention to industrial glassware with the outbreak of World War I. Although its production of jewellery has dwindled, the house of Lalique is still renowned worldwide for its glassware.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs6AwtyhphQ/?igshid=i85okms1zywh

By Genevieve Davis

Sources

https://www.christies.com/features/guides/jewelry/styles

https://gulbenkian.pt/museu/en/new-readings/lalique-and-the-woman-flower/

https://www.lalique.com/en/world-of-lalique/lalique-timeline

https://www.musee-lalique.com/en/discover/lalique-more-name/rene-lalique

https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/rene-lalique-7-things-you-need-to-know

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/h/history-of-fashion-1840-1900/?gclid=CjwKCAiAwrf-BRA9EiwAUWwKXq0tzTlbjMYliPXhO9ySBPm1kvXa2eX9b0355YLyIV0zrcuNKKUYdxoCWXUQAvD_BwE

Madeleine Vionnet transformed the way in which designers approached the female figure. Eschewing the restrictiveness and rigidity of the corset, she favoured free-flowing silhouettes which accentuated the natural curves of a woman’s body. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, she revolutionised the fashion industry through her use of the bias cut, a technique of cutting on the diagonal grain of the fabric to give it a sinuous and stretchy quality. Previously confined to small and often hidden details of garment design, this cut became the defining feature of the 1930s female silhouette. Vionnet applied it to the entirety of a dress’s design, enabling the fabric to cling to women’s bodies without the support of padding, fastenings or buttons. This was a pivotal moment in dressmaking history, as it meant women could be elegant yet comfortable in their occasion wear, and appear feminine, yet be free to move around.

When Betty Kirke interviewed former employees of Vionnet’s fashion house on the Rue de Rivoli, they insisted she was a “technician” rather than a “designer”. Her bias-cut dress designs, though chic and simple in appearance, were highly complex and technical to execute. She did not sketch, but instead worked three-dimensionally on miniature dolls, cutting and pinning fabric to fit their form. She ordered fabric two yards wider than her original measurements to accommodate for extensive drapery, and left it to hang in her studio for a week to allow gravity to stretch it out to its full length. Once satisfied that the fabric was sufficiently stretched out that it would not warp over time, she re-created her designs on full-size models in the round. This corporeal approach to dress earned Vionnet the title “the architect of dressmakers”. Her mastery of the technicalities of fabric, and its potential to work with the natural curvature of the female figure, was unparalleled for decades to come.

The most striking aspect of Vionnet’s designs was the freedom of movement they allowed women. Inspired by ancient Greek sculpture, Vionnet used classical style drapery and folding to create a sense of motion and lightness in her dresses. As she said in an interview for French Vogue in 1974, “I proved that fabric falling freely on a body liberated from heavy armature was beautiful in and of itself… I attempted to bring to fabric a balance that movement in -no way altered, but rather magnified.” Far-removed from the support and structure of 19th century corsetry, her dresses took on the form of a silky second skin which moved gracefully with the bodies they covered.

In 1940 Vionnet’s label went into liquidation and her name faded quickly. However, for designers and dress historians her contribution to fashion will never be forgotten. As Azzedine Alaïa said, she was “the source of everything, the mother of us all”. Her ingenious use of the bias-cut to accentuate the natural female form changed the shape of fashion forever.

By Violet Caldecott

Sources

https://www.crfashionbook.com/culture/a27223852/cr-muse-madeleine-vionnet/

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/madeleine-vionnet-an-introduction?gclid=Cj0KCQiAtqLBRC0ARIsAF4K3WHPFvxlB8O4Xu32EpVeBAIcdR2_FlOtUpWxhYQpQM9DBTtMcQwgCRAaAoOAEALw_wcB

https://www.heroine.com/the-editorial/bias-cut-technique

http://explodingfashion.arts.ac.uk/p=438

https://judithclarkcostume.com/wp-content/uploads/Judith-Clark-16ppVionnet.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/style/tmagazine/t_w_1551_1554_1555_talk_vionne_.html

Fashion Interpretations Symposium, Part III remedied Wednesday’s mid-week slump with a fascinatingly interdisciplinary approach to fashion — watercolours, mythological goddesses, and a ramshackle cowshed all featured.

The evening’s speakers included author, artist, and publisher Leanne Shapton and Judith Clark, curator and exhibition-maker.

To begin, Leanne Shapton gave us a sneak peak into her ongoing project investigating the way clothes are photographed and sold digitally. She focussed particularly on the way that amateur photography is used on online fashion sales platforms. Intriguingly, she highlighted the appeal of the carelessly shot, badly lit eBay image that seduces the buyer into believing they have found a treasure. Her current ongoing project is to create watercolour studies and paintings of these photographic eccentricities, focusing on their shapes and silhouettes as a way to understand their distinctly uncanny yet appealing aura.

Judith Clark presented her paper that analyses the relationship between word and image through Stéphanie-Félicité, Madame de Genlis’ nineteenth-century fashion illustrations labelled after goddesses Venus, Aphrodite, Minerva, and Juno. She questioned: did the words inspire the image, or vice versa? A bridge between word and image is particularly pertinent to the fashion exhibition, as Judith noted that curators are consistently looking for ‘meaningful adjacencies between objects.’ If language, she concludes, is what creates confusion between objects in a museum setting, then we must begin to consider alternative paths. Particularly of note was an audience question about Judith’s research process in the Warburg Library throughout the pandemic. She revealed that she had begun to key in bookmarks of pages, in order to artificially simulate archives that might be physically beside one another – an interesting example of the way we have to adapt to our new and wholly online experience of the world.

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Finally, the evening concluded with a short film collaboration between Roman Kurzmeyer and Judith Clark, which turned the way that we think about exhibitions on its head. The Amden Atelier, a project that uses an old cattle stall in the mountains as a venue to showcase art installations lends itself to a debate about what it really means to be an ‘exhibition maker’. It requests an engagement with the site: artists and curators must specifically work with the building. This unique short film highlighted a multitude of ways we can think about the exhibition, the importance of perceptual conditions, and the ‘hyper image’.

The fascinating content we were presented with last night seemed to be incredibly pertinent to our current situation: the growing popularity of online shopping in a post-pandemic eco-conscious world, the effects looking at archives remotely has on academic research, and a case study on how particular environments relates to our experience of viewing art.

More from Fashion Interpretations Symposium tonight, with its fourth event!

By Kathryn Reed

At last night’s Fashion Interpretations Symposium we heard from three amazing speakers: Lisa Cohen, Associate Professor of English and of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut; Olga Vainshtein, Senior Researcher at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow; and Elizabeth Kutesko, Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Central Saint Martins in London.

Lisa Cohen led with a poetic presentation on the relationship between clothing and grief. Clothing reminds us of those we have lost, a remnant of someone mourned. It can provide a sense of closeness to a loved one or a sense of catharsis through the giving away the clothes to others. Cohen first described an interview with a woman named Anne as they went through Anne’s parents’ clothing together. Reminiscing over a black bolero cardigan and a beautiful white lace dress, Cohen conveyed the sense of connection formed between people by clothing. Wearing, touching, or smelling a loved one’s clothing can trigger a kaleidoscope of memories. Cohen also touched upon her own relationship with filmmaker Jim Lyons, whose AIDS-related death she chose to speak poignantly on yesterday, which was World AIDS Day. She spoke of the bag of t-shirts he left her; a symbol of their friendship kept on her shelf for over a decade. Cohen’s personal interactions with each person she interviewed in her research brought to life the deep intimacy between clothing and relationships.

Olga Vainshtein provided an in-depth look at fashion in literature and cultural interpretations of illustration. Focusing on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1886 novel, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Vainshtein discussed how the illustrations of the little lord in his suit, drawn by Reginald Birch, sparked a trend in boys’ fashion. Though the novel provided few descriptions of Lord Fauntleroy’s suits, Birch was a popular illustrator and the vivid drawings were mimicked in magazines, with pictures of each outfit and the pieces required for it, so that mothers could order ready-made outfits for their sons in the latest style. The illustrations were based on Burnett’s son Vivian, and they were inspired by late-seventeenth century and early eighteenth-century court dress. Vainshtein’s presentation allowed us a peak into the way fashion and fiction interact through “cultural illusion,” demonstrating how literature has the ability to impact fashion as much as photography and film.

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Elizabeth Kutesko rounded off the night with a talk on Claude and Dina Levi-Strauss’ photographs of São Paolo from 1935-37. In one image, Kutesko examined Dina Levi-Strauss’ tailored, manicured outfit that contrasted the wilderness around her as she explored Brazil, highlighting how São Paolo was poised between an agricultural past and an industrial future. She also highlighted the ways the snapshots captured the picturesque nature of the city, with modern skyscrapers and well-dressed pedestrians, while simultaneously including the “extra,” such as rubbish in the gutters. In the 1930s, São Paolo transformed into Brazil’s industrial centre, but Kutesko emphasized how the Levi-Strauss’ photographs emphasized the “unfinished” nature of the city, as light leaks and blurring mirrored its constant transformation. The concept of modernity varies from culture to culture, operating across national borders and within them. Kutesko concluded with the idea that photographs capture these moments of modernity, often immortalizing more than can be seen by a single glance.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CIQvgphApyA/

These three speakers were unified in their emphasis on the importance of memory. Memory can be captured in photograph, touched in a piece of clothing left behind, or disseminated through a novel. Fashion, and the mediums through which it is displayed, provides pathways to explore these memories and the emotions they provoke.

Join us tonight for Fashion Interpretations Symposium – Part III.

By Genevieve Davis

It is going to be an exciting week for fashion enthusiasts around the world! The Fashion Interpretations Symposium has officially begun and so also begins our daily recaps here of each night.

Dr. Rebecca Arnold’s discussion on Man Ray’s images for February 1937 issue of Harper’s Bazaar kickstarted the event, emphasising how the artist manipulated the photographic medium to blur the line between photography and illustration, respectively the most recent and the most established forms to represent fashion during the interwar years. Man Ray simultaneously saw himself as the creator of the image but also of the medium through which it would have been received. Using the technique of solarization to achieve a tone reversal effect on the black and white photograph, he would then apply a gouache to certain areas of the image to emphasise the colours. In one of the images presented, the perception of a white dress with a ghostly grey train was contrasted by the bright hues suggested by the applied splashes of colour, reflecting the descriptive text under the picture. Man Ray’s images were, to quote Dr. Arnold, ‘foregrounding the medium, drawing upon the idea of us as embodied viewers’, experiencing the image through the use of both optic and haptic sensations.

Elisa De Wyngaert, fashion curator at MoMu Fashion Museum in Antwerp, followed Dr. Arnold’s presentation, discussing her process when planning a new exhibition. She explained how, for her, the early stages of exhibition planning resemble the feeling of being a teenager decorating her walls: for a brief moment every item seems able to reach, without logistic or conservation challenges, and no budget restriction. What follows is the very slow process of “letting go”, as sometimes pieces are missing, too fragile or too expensive to loan, and the moment when the “wall of dreams” is translated to a more practical excel sheet. Elisa emphasised how the wall collage is an important part of the exhibition history: this is the moment corresponding to the teenage years of the exhibition, which is in the process of developing its identity. The “exhibition of dreams” then grows up into what we audience see. At this point, the exhibition does not belong to the curator anymore, but to everyone. Every person becomes part of the story, in the way they personally experience the exhibition.

Charles Tepperman, Associate Professor of Film Studies at The University of Calgary, concluded the presentation part of the night with “A World Dressed in Kodachrome – Fashion and Amateur Film in the mid-century”. Kodak introduced the Kodachrome film stock in 1935, becoming an amateur favourite for the way it allowed to capture formal and vernacular dress, and use colour almost as a textile in its own right. Kodachrome provided one of the first widely accessible tools to capture colour and created a true “chromatic modernity”. Amateur filmmakers such as Chicago-based Warren Thompson and Matthew Ko dressed the world in colour and motion, and their amateur films can now be considered kinetic records of how people dressed. Through their lenses, the city was transformed into a chromatic composition of streets, fabrics and styles.

As the event came to an end, I was left with a question: what are we attracted by when looking at fashion? Is it the colours it presents? Or the emotions it sparks? Is it its mix of textures, inviting us to touch the garments or imagine how they would feel on our skin? It may well be a combination of these three factors and many others relating to our subjective experience. What is clear to me, however, is that people are central to the shaping of fashion, and that the fashion object can only be fully understood in relation to people’s experience of it.

Tune in tonight for Fashion Interpretations Symposium Part II!

By Simona Mezzina

As a teenager growing up in London in the 2010s, it was a rite of passage to ask for hair straighteners for Christmas – at least it was for my group of friends from our Catholic all-girls school. I remember when I got my first pair of straighteners at about 14. I was overjoyed. I could get rid of the kinks in my hair, and there was no need to go around to my mate’s house to get her to straighten my hair. I could frazzle my hair away on my own terms.

Everyone had to have straight hair: no matter who you were, no matter what texture your hair was, even if it was straight already, you’d straighten it. Dead straight. No-room-for-movement straight. Not only were we at ease because we were fitting in, we’d also have hours of fun sat, splitting our split ends.

I’d look at photographs of my grandma and her friends with their bouffant hairstyles. I used to call the style ‘pie heads’ because it seemed as though they had just set something on top of their heads, covered it with hair, and put it in the oven to bake. (I wasn’t far off, to be fair.)

But I was confused. What was under there? How did it stay in place? And why on earth would they put themselves through the arduous task of defying gravity for a hairstyle that wasn’t even cool?

Recently, my grandma and I were looking through old photographs, as we often do, and I came across this image of my grandparents with their group of Welsh friends who all moved to the South East London/Kent area in the mid-fifties. You can see each of the women’s hair is immaculate; their curls look as though they would stay completely still even through ferocious head-shaking. My grandma told me this was possible because of hair pieces and expert hairdressers, stating:

“I wore a hair piece. Everywhere you went people back combed and permed their hair. Generally, if you didn’t have natural curly hair you would have it permed to give it body and curls. I used to have a demi-perm which would last about 6-8 weeks. (My hair, if I had a full perm, would frizz so I had a weaker solution).”

Her hairdresser, friend and neighbor, Judith, would do my grandma’s hair for these special occasions (she was a lecturer at Bromley college for hairdressing, my grandma hastened to add): “Judith would buy the dark chestnut hairpiece and give my hair a rinse [with dye] – which would last about 4-6 weeks – so that it would match the piece exactly. She would wash my hair, put rollers in and put me under the dryer. At the same time, she would wash the hair piece and put it under the dryer next to me.” The idea was to give more height and volume to the style.

I asked my grandma the question that had been burning inside me since my teen hair days. But why? Why would you go through such a laborious process for one night?

Magazines were full of photographs of these hairstyles and suggestions on how to wear your hair: “I used to read Vanity Fair in the hairdressers to look at new styles.” Some hairdressers were major celebrities at the time and mixed with high society and theatre stars.” She urged me to look up ‘Monsieur Raymond’ AKA Mr Teasy-Weasy AKA Raymond Bessone.

Raymond Bessone was Brixton-born but adopted a faux-French accent. He was affectionately called Mr Teasy-Weasy after his trademark of ‘teasy-weasy’ curls. He opened his Mayfair salon in the 1950s and became a critically acclaimed celebrity hairstylist in Britain and the U.S. His own presentation, as seen on TV, was immaculately flamboyant. His suits were consistently decorated with dyed carnations, and his dogs had their hair dyed to match whatever Bessone dictated to be the colour of the season.

Bessone saw women’s hair as a work of art. “It must have balance and composition. Lines must mean something, with every curl adding to the whole effect.” He was concerned with creating a complete look that crowned the woman’s face. In his 1957 style called the Shangri-La, he pronounced the four main principles of hairstyling: “colour, line, youth and softness.”

His voluminous, precise styles transformed women even in the depths of South Wales, where, in the early 50s, my grandma would be sat home perming her and her sister’s hair to get the perfect bouffant.

However, my grandma noticed a shift happening around her at the end of this decade: “Mary Quant had her hair cut in a straight simple style and the times changed drastically.”

Ironically, Mary Quant’s famous hairstylist who gave her the geometric ‘wash-and-wear’ cut in 1964, Vidal Sassoon, began his training under our very own Mr Teasy-Weasy in his Mayfair salon. Sassoon revolutionised not only the look of femininity, harking back to the ‘gamine look’ found in the first part of the century, but also the process of looking after your hair. Much like Quant’s designs, Sassoon’s cut was ready-to-wear. This revolutionised hairdressing from the technique of the hairdresser, working with lines and geometric shapes to match the face and the personality of the sitter, to the routine of the customer, as it released women from the chore of getting their hair in the salon every time there was an event. They only needed to go every six weeks for a trim to upkeep their natural style.

Why has the novelty of hairstyling been lost on me? Did Sassoon’s easy-to-wear style push many of us towards easy followable trends and subsequently the standardisation of cuts? Without Sassoon, would I have been asking for a hairpiece to create the ‘teasy-weasy’ bouffant just like grandma’s rather than a pair of straighteners?

By Bethan Eleri Carrick

Christopher Reed, ‘Vidal Sassoon Obituary’, Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2012/may/09/vidal-sassoon 
Jon Henly, ‘A Cut Above’, Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/jan/09/fashion.shopping
Mary Quant, Vidal Sassoon remembered by Mary Quant https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2012/dec/22/vidal-sassoon-obituary-mary-quant
Susan J Vincent, Hair: An Illustrated History. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018)
‘Teasy Weasy’, Timeshift, BBC, 2013
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01kgq18