Louise Brooks and the most imitated hairstyle of modern times

After the Great War (1914-1919) everything changed. All of a sudden, people liberated themselves from the conventions of the pre-war period that had put everybody in a straightjacket of rules and do's and don'ts which had even emprisoned politicians and kings and queens into ways of thinking that were impossible to keep up, yet were considered the only right way. It led to WW I and the fall of the German Empire, the Austrian Empire, the Russian Empire, and, eventually, the British Empire. Before the war, fashion was like politics. Thick with mores, centuries old dress habits, unwieldy, unbefitting and not fitting the times of fast travel and industrialisation that were making the new world. One of the things that came forward from centuries of habits was the immensely complex hairdo's for women. There was only one effort to do something about it, and that started in an
American cartoon in the 1890's, the Gibson Girl. Here is a postage stamp showing "the impossible hair". Nobody had so much hair in reality but young women were desperately trying to look exactly like that.

After the war, we had the flappers, young liberated women who wore no corsets, no petticoats and other complicated frocks, only a straight dress. The big bulging bosoms of their mothers and grandmothers were out of fashion, the less the better. Straight dresses and the legs and arms flapping around on the music of the Charleston. The roaring Twenties were born, and all of a sudden people were allowed to party, put brilliantly in letters by Francis Scott Fitzgerald in his seminal book This side of Paradise. YYYYesssssssss! Why wait until you're dead?
In all that buzz, people were still having difficult hairdo's. Everybody had curls and it took ages to get it right. But look, there was the saviour in the form of an innocuous girl called Louise Brooks. (Click HERE to get hip to her. Published 2 years after this article) She had terrible hair that would not curl. So in desperation she had cut it straight short on the front and the back and the side, "bobbed" or just "bob", styled it a bit with some extra hair at the sides. Soon she cut it in a V from the neck upward, tapered, which is called 'In shingle' or 'shingles'. It was easy, it was right right away and had no need for continuous hairdressing.
And she invented it herself.
People were shocked. It was boyish, they thought. So they called it Boyish Bob.
The stylish bit is the forward curl at the ears, the bangs.

The star of seventeen silent films, her most famous being Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, Louise Brooks portrayed strong female characters that challenged the sexual mores of the time, as well as the norms of beauty and fashion. Prior to the 1920s, women’s hairstyles were primarily curled and required a lot of time to style. Brooks had worn a bob since childhood, but adapted it into the characteristic sleek and ear-length cut with bangs when she began her career.

©2012, Charles van der Hoog. Posted 23 May 2019.