Description
Book SynopsisHair: Styling, Culture and Fashion explores the social importance of hair, wherever it grows, explaining the cultural significance of hair and hairiness, and presenting a new critical engagement with hair and its stories, histories, performances and rituals. From heads, legs and underarms, to wigs and beards, and everything in between, the presentation, manipulation and daily experience of human hair plays a central and dynamic role within fashion, self-expression and the creation of social identity. The book's diverse range of cross-cultural essays encompasses the study of hair in fashion, film, art, history, literature, performance and consumer culture. Offering an accessible mix of visual analysis, cultural commentary and critical theory, Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion will appeal to all those interested in the presentation and analysis of cultural identity and the body.
Trade ReviewThis work provides an intriguing, interdisciplinary, multifaceted kaleidoscope focused on the universality of hair and its relationship to culture. These studies cover a wide spectrum, such as Hundu ritual tonsuring, African combing, salon styling, Islamic shaving, and aristocratic wigging. Overall, they provide a new lens for understanding the human condition and identity, both the exotic and personal. B. B. Chico, CHOICE Magazine
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Foreword, Caroline Cox Author's Biographies 1. Introduction: Thinking About Hair, Geraldine Biddle-Perry And Sarah Cheang Part One: Histories of Hair On the Head, Face and Body 2. Fashionable Hair In The Eighteenth Century: Theatricality and Display, Louisa Cross, 3. Roots: Hair and Race, Sarah Cheang 4. Revealing and Concealing: Notes and Observations on Eroticism and Female Pubic Hair, Jack Sargeant 5. From Style to Place: The Emergence Of The Hair Salon in the Twentieth Century, Kim Smith 6. The Big Shave: Fashions In Modern Male Facial Hair, Dene October Part Two: Hair & Identity 7. Hair And Male (Homo) Sexuality: Up Top And Down Below, Shaun Cole 8. Hair, Gender And Looking, Geraldine Biddle-Perry 9. Men's Facial Hair in Islam: A Matter of Interpretation, Faegheh Shirazi 10. Resounding Power Of The Afro Comb, Carol Tulloch 11. Concerning Blondeness: Gender, Ethnicity, Spectacle And Footballers' Waves, Pamela Church-Gibson 12. Hair, devotion and trade in India, Eiluned Edwards Part Three: Hair in Representation: Film, Art, Fashion, Literature & Performance 13. Hairpieces: Hair, Identity and Memory in the Work of Mona Hatoum, Leila McKellar 14. Hair Without a Head: Disembodiment and The Uncanny, Janice Miller 15. Hair and Fashioned Femininity in Two Nineteenth-Century Novels, Royce Mahawatte. 16. Hair control: The Feminine 'Disciplined Head', Thom Hecht 17. Hair-'Dressing' In Desperate Housewives: Narration, Characterisation, And The Pleasures Of Reading Hair, Rachel Velody 18. Hair Styling In The Fashion Magazine: Nova In The 1970s, Alice Beard Conclusion 19. Conclusion: Hair and Human Identity, Sarah Cheang and Geraldine Biddle-Perry End Notes Index
