The Historical Allure of the Coiffure

Hair can grow. Hair can be cut. Hair can be straight or curly, thick or thin. It can be wiry or smooth, long or short. Even voluminous or flat. Some cultures are precious about it; some aren’t. Hair can be colourful or monochrome, dyed or natural. Everyone has it. In fact, we’re covered in it: our face, head, arms and legs and other places too. It can be used to disguise or flaunt, conceal or reveal. And, above all, it’s heavily political.

The human body is too often still objectified as a person's calling card, together with the clothes - or lack of - that adorn it. But what about the coiffure which sits upon a head? A new exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery in London reminds us that historically, the make-up of a hair do has been seen as a sexual gesture in itself.

The 18th century Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli had a fetish for women's hair, as is the focus of the exhibition of his private drawings of fashionable women currently showing at The Courtauld. Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism centres around Fuseli’s depiction of women as sexual prowesses, using hair to illustrate their power, want and inhibited desire. The depictions are - at least to say - extraordinary.

What makes the drawings even more elaborate is how the hair styles are contrasted with other areas of the paintings, rendered in fewer details and intentionally unfinished in places. Dresses or backgrounds lay bare to emphasise these magnificent creations that are part fantasised by Fuseli himself, part suggestive and - well - part real. (It’s well known that Georgian women spent much time, attention and money dressing their hair). Detailed, laboriously delicate and not to mention complicated, it’s clear that a hefty amount of planning would’ve gone into these intricate portrayals. Hair is mounted high on rollers, decorated with ribbons and feathers, together with beads and lace, then heavily powdered. In Fuseli's depictions, hair styles appear in detail akin to alien forms, or even humanly brain-like.

The otherworldly aspect to these coiffures is also suggestive of the anxieties about women during this period, owing to sexual disease and their witchy allure. As The Guardian reported in their review: 'This was an age when James Boswell casually mentions in his diary that while crossing London Bridge he stopped for a quick, unplanned negotiation with a sex worker', a known fact amongst art academics that suggests Fuseli wasn't isolated in his own wandering thoughts and fetishistic ways - ones that transferred his real-life habits and thoughts onto paper. (A subversive act not atypical of artists in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain.) Many of Fuseli's subjects are high-end 'prostitutes' as they were then called, who he seems both fascinated and fearful of. Sketched into life using pen, ink, graphite and watercolour, their faces are dark and devilish, aside from when the artist's wife Sophia features. 'It was a judgemental, moralising obsession, finger-wagging but at the same time pawing', The Telegraph aptly reported. Indeed, Fuseli's other work includes sketches of men brought to their knees in submission to the perceived abuses of sex workers.

When it comes to the hair creations themselves, their true beauty is overwhelmingly glaring, yet not necessarily unusual for the period either. The sheer scale of some toupee depictions indeed defy gravity, as well as the limitations of your classic hair-do. Fast forward a couple of hundred years and similarly, ikon-1 (SHOWstudio and Nick Knight's upcoming digital fashion project) collaborator and seminal hairstylist Eugene Souleiman has also broken with tradition to create wigs that go above and beyond. 'I don't have rules and I don't have those limitations when it comes to hair' Eugene clarified with SHOWstudio's editor Hetty Mahlich when she interviewed him about his creative process and boundary-breaking wigs for ikon-1. 'I don't even think about evolution, I think it's about having a complete different mindset regarding the possibilities that have never existed before with hair.' Using anything he could get his hands on, Eugene broke free of what is usually expected or associated with hair and rendered some styles using vegetables, flowers and even tree bark. If we've learnt one thing, anything is possible. Who said hair looks best natural?