Short hair has obvious benefits. In Classical Greece and Rome, where hairdressing matured into a public service, hair was worn short and was a clear sign of civilization in comparison to the barbarian neighbors. This trend persisted in Europe until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when pageboy styles emerged as part of an aristocratic fashion. The clerical puddingbasin, ear-revealing style of the early fifteenth century was superseded by a longer pageboy style—rough in the north and coiffured in Italy. By contrast, in Mesoamerica Inca chiefs wore relatively short hair, and commoners wore progressively longer hair.
The French Revolution and the accompanying militarism induced short styles for both men and women. Women classically adopted short curls that framed the face or smooth plaits around the head. They also wore colored wigs.
In the industrial nineteenth century, among the emerging middle class, men wore short curled and dressed hair with a moustache, sideburns, or beard. The exigencies of the World Wars, particularly World War I, prompted a return to short hair and loss of facial adornment, which apart from the counterculture of the 1960s established a norm that has persisted into the twenty-first century.
In the West, women cut or “bobbed” their hair as a symbol of their political and social emancipation after World War I. This trend was followed by a succession of celebrity-inspired short, head-clinging hairstyles. The permanent wave, invented by the German Charles Nessler around 1905, offered styling to the masses. In the same vein, the invention of rollers for waving made possible the very short, layered Italian look. In the 1960s the availability of natural-looking hair pieces in the form of full wigs, half wigs, or long falls, at all prices, enabled almost every woman to own one or more to suit her taste and mood.
