Lindsey Palka’s previous work for The Toast can be found here. This post was brought to you by Caitlin.
If you’ve spent any time at all perusing antique jewelry sales or online estate auctions, you’ve probably stumbled across—and been creeped out by—some Victorian hair jewelry. But come back! Don’t be creeped out. It’s not creepy at all—it’s actually an incredibly interesting type of jewelry that teaches us a lot about the way Victorian women understood love, family, and death.
Today we see hair as a slightly gross bit of personal ephemera—no one wants to find a hair in their food, and to find a lock of hair somewhere borders on horrifying. Victorians tended to view hair much more sentimentally, though. Women traditionally grew their hair their whole lives, and much religious and popular rhetoric focused on it being a woman’s “crowning glory” and her beauty. Young girls typically wore their hair loose or in braids and began to pin it up in their mid or late teens, as a signifier of reaching maturity and adulthood. Adult and married women generally wore their hair pinned up always, sometimes in quite elaborate hairdos, with few exceptions. Not to be ignored, men in the late Victorian period began to wear their hair in slicked-over styles requiring the use of oils and creams like the heavily fragrant Macassar oil to give the popular “wet look” (pictured.) Fun fact: Antimacassars, the doilies or embroidered cloths that rest on the backs of armchairs or sofas in fussy B&Bs and period homes, were originally intended to prevent men from staining the backs of upholstered furniture with their oily hairdos—hence “anti-Macassar [oil].”. The next time you see an antimacassar, you are seeing a relic of a long-antiquated men’s hairstyle.
Hair was an important signifier to Victorians, not only of social class, but a sentimental part of their lives. The only truly common remaining remnant of hair sentimentality today is mothers who keep a lock or two from their children’s first haircuts—a staple in baby books. It was very common for Victorian women to exchange locks of hair, especially between dear friends and family whom one may never see again—a particularly common concern when traveling was time-consuming and expensive, and immigration usually left no option for a return trip. Schoolgirls frequently exchanged hair for scrapbooks as a memento. (In Anne of Green Gables, Anne asks Diana for a lock of her hair when they believe they are “parted forever” and Anne promises to “sew it up in a little bag and wear it around my neck all my life.” ) Consequently, to take a lock of hair from a recently-deceased loved one was very typical method of remembrance.
Exchanging locks of hair began to become popular in 16th-century France and England, and was a somewhat-common upper-class affectation for a couple of centuries. Beginning in the early 1800s it began to become extraordinarily popular, and by the turn of the century, hair art—and more specifically, hair jewelry—was so common that jewelers and high-fashion outlets began to describe it as tasteless, sentimental trash.
Part of the reason for its booming popularity was that it was “decent” enough to be worn during mourning. Mourning clothing forms a large part of our modern ideas of the Victorians, due in large part to two factors: The Civil War, and Queen Victoria. The Civil War created millions of bereaved American families and fostered a general culture that tended towards mourning and respect for the dead. Queen Victoria’s beloved consort Prince Albert died in 1861, and she plunged herself into a deep mourning that would last until her death in 1901. Then, as now, famous people set social trends, and mourning became fashionable.
Women were typically expected to be the chief mourners in their homes, in large part because their dress was instantly and significantly changeable. A man’s suit could take him from wedding to funeral without a change, but a woman donning a black crape dress and veil was an instant signifier of household mourning. The social demonstration of mourning was a highly gendered activity. Since birth and death both happened at home, they tended to fall under the umbrella of women’s cares, and a general understanding of women as more religious than men meant that mourning became a feminized activity.
Etiquette guides and ladies’ magazines became popular guides for The Correct Way To Mourn. Typically, “deep mourning” was for adult women who had lost a parent, spouse, or child, and was worn for a year and a day past the bereavement. “Half-mourning” meant different types of black fabrics and was worn for no less than six months, and “light mourning” typically meant subdued colours and jewelry, for at least three months, but at the wearer’s discretion. These various types of dress multiplied by dozens of familial connections meant a whole galaxy of permutations of mourning wear for women. (For example, women who married a man who had been widowed were often faced with the death of relative of the first wife, and were expected to wear some type of mourning clothes as a sort of proxy mourner on behalf of her husband.)
So, mourning wear often dominated women’s sartorial choices for years. In many cases it was intended to shield mourners from the wider world, since a woman wearing a three-foot black veil would be treated with deference and gentility in a public place. But this also set her apart and made her glamorous and worthy of special treatment—making it popular. Mourning wear was a signifier of class and wealth, since black fabrics such as crape and bombazine were difficult to maintain and care for. But thanks to the Industrial Revolution, fabric gradually dropped in cost, making it more accessible and more popular for middle- and lower-class women to wear mourning. In fact, mourning warehouses opened that sold black clothing off-the-rack (one of the very first instances where women could purchase ready-made clothing off the rack, in fact), along with all manner of “mourning essentials”—black-edged paper and notecards, black-edged handkerchiefs, black parasols, black veils, and especially mourning jewelry. Initially jewelry was forbidden during deep mourning, but gradually jet jewelry became accepted and even popular. Hair jewelry also came to be very popular as a form of jewelry suitable for mourning the deceased.
Clearly, mourning was becoming increasingly commercialized, as were many, many other aspects of society. Gradually instead of homemade items, nearly everything could be purchased in stores—soap and medicine and silver polish and clothes and thousands of items for every room in the house. These dramatic changes in society led many to romanticize the past and create strict social behaviours—like mourning—to bring a sense of stability to a world dizzy with possibilities. Women also turned to creative arts—like the creation of hair jewelry and art—to bring a sense of domesticity and personalization to parlours increasingly decorated with mass-printed lithographs.
The creation of hair jewelry and art was intensely personal and highly feminized. Magazine tutorials and pamphlets gave step-by-step instructions on how to create intricate woven pieces of jewelry and art, similar to magazines today that publish instructions on how to create a certain hairstyle or piece of home décor. Women worked from these instructions frequently in groups of family or friends as a bonding experience. Creation of these items often brought a structure to mourning—the creation of an item to remember and honour the deceased by could be intensely powerful and moving. Today we would probably describe this as a way of processing, grieving, and accepting the death. To the Victorians it was a way of remembering their loved one in a tangible way.
What could be more enduring than hair art? Hair does not decay, and if cared for properly it will remain as stable as on the day of the death. The most common hair jewelry then and now were lockets and brooches. Lockets are ideal for keeping a tiny snippet of hair in, and date back to the original days of hair memorials in the 16th century. Brooches were very common in the Victorian period, and it was easy to arrange a braid or carefully-decorated lock of hair under glass. Men who carried hair art usually confined it to simple braids or decoration on pocketwatch fobs. Magazines gave instructions on how to treat hair with a homemade mixture to stiffen it, allowing women to create rings, necklaces, bracelets, and even hair bows made out of delicately woven hair. (You could wear a hair bow made of hair in your own hair!) Bottled mixtures of glue were sold or available by mail-order catalogue that promised to maintain the structural integrity of hair art for decades to come.
Hair art was also a popular motif for inside the home. The most common were hair wreaths (pictured above), usually composed of ringlets of hair from each member of the family, arranged in an artistic way under glass. These could grow quite extensively, comprising hair from not only parents and children, but grandparents, cousins, and a host of other family members. Occasionally hairwork could be twisted and frizzled to resemble crosses (puctured below) or flowers, and then would be displayed under a glass case. Hair could be chopped into tiny pieces and used to create texture in paintings. Hair art was an obvious, tangible, clear sign of familial love and devotion.
Just like any other homemade art form, it quickly grew commercialized, and mail-order shops sprang up that promised to take a loved one’s hair and return it some weeks later as a beautiful piece of wearable art. However, these shops were not held in high regard—many feared that the art returned to them would be the hair of a stranger, rendering it pointless. In many ways the yen for homemade hair art and hair jewelry is like the resurgence of handicrafts today—knitting, quilting, canning, and other domestic arts. Far from being a morbid reminder of death, it was a comforting memento of a much-missed loved one. Creating hair jewelry and art was a uniquely feminized way of bonding and grieving. Hair art also created a feminine historical record of the home as a counterpoint to outside sources controlled and administered by men—a tangible record of births and deaths, families and friends, love and grief.
Hair art is probably not due for a resurgence any time soon, like knitting or quilting. But far from being morbid, hair art and hair jewelry was a uniquely feminine form of mourning that did not rely on the public gaze, like black clothing. It provided a way for women to bond with family and beloved friends, to mourn relatives, create beautiful objects, and form a familial record distinct from outside sources. A surprisingly large number of hairwork pieces remain today—a testament to their wild popularity during the nineteenth century. While in almost every case the family story behind the jewelry or art has been lost to time and the passing of fads, hair art remains a fascinating and valuable way to examine an understudied part of Victorian women’s experiences.
Tags: artwork, history, lindsey palka, victorians
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Nope, I’m bringing hair art back. Someone find me the manuals and a suitable lock of hair, and I shall create the grandest of hair bows so people will be forced to see how totally fucking great hair art is.
This is so cool! Goodness, I love the Toast because I learn about so many things I never even knew existed.
I am IN to hair art. IN TO IT.
And I can see the appeal of taking a physical thing from a dead loved one and turning it into art. Something beautiful to remind you of the person you lost, with a physical reminder too.
While I’m glad we don’t have to do full mourning any more it would be nice to be able to do some kind of visual clue that you’re grieving and should be treated gently. Maybe we could bring that back.
I was thinking that too, about the visual cue of mourning! I’m sure it was sometimes a pain to have to dress in mourning in socially prescribed ways (and what if you needed to grieve longer than a year, or less?), but what a nice thing it would be to have some way to say, “hey, I’m not okay right now” if you wanted to.
Awww yeah, hair art/jewelry is AMAZING. I went to a store that was full of mourning jewelry (and, oddly, birdcages), and the guy who ran it said, “Imagine how much care and love went into these.” No more strange, I think, than keeping someone’s ashes in your home.
As far as a socially proscribed, “Top Ten Ways to Adapt Mourning to Bikini Season” type activity, no, I don’t want that, but I do wish mourning were a more visible (voluntary but not ostracized) activity nowadays. I live and grew up in rural Tennessee, where in some cultures, a special type of mourning, mostly surrounding funeral home visitations, is still a Big Deal. That comforts me, but the lack of adherence to traditional clothing standards does bug me in my own fussy little way. I still wear all black to funerals, even if I don’t know the person that well, and even though my grandmother (who I look to for those sorts of old-fashioned social cues) doesn’t. She usually wears dark-colored church clothes.
I’ll admit I’ve always been a little weird, but something about customs that revolve around clothes have always really comforted me, and when I’m feeling sad or even just serious, I wear a lot of black. People have for some reason decided this is their business and occasionally criticized it, but I just try to embody the spirit of Johnny Cash and go on my slightly less-than-merry way.
I always wear black to a funeral, too. It just feels like the right thing to do, somehow. (For me, that is – I don’t care how others dress at funerals!)
After 9/11/01, when I was 21, I wore black for several days afterward, because the enormity of the loss seemed to call for it.
There is a growing body of merchandise available to people who want that physical, beautiful bit of something that contains a small part of a loved one who’s died. My favorite is cremation glass—the artists take a teaspoon or so of the cremated remains and incorporate them into gorgeous swirly multi-colored art glass, which is then made into paperweights, pendants, or just pretty sculptures that creep people out way less than urns. (We sell a lot of it—but only to clients who *ask* about it, my employer is NOT into up-selling, and that’s one of the reasons I work where I do. Mostly, the extravagant expenditures come from people who know that the life insurance policy will be taken by Medicare–at least, any of it that’s not spent on funeral expenses. Nine thousand dollars’ worth of cremation glass paperweights and pendants TOTALLY counts as “funeral expenses”!!)
Ahhhh I’d heard the word antimacassar before but the explanation makes so much sense! I assumed it was some crappy joke like, keep your wife from massacring you for getting crud on the furniture.
I’ve noticed that now, taking a lock of hair seems to be something we do for animals rather than people. I dunno if anyone else has this experience, but growing up, we would always snip a braid out of a horse’s mane if he or she were going to be put down or had passed away.
I’ve had a bracelet made out of my two horses’ tails now, as one of them is 31 and unlikely to be immortal. I wanted to do it now so I could wear it while he’s alive and not have it be morbid and upsetting after he does pop off. I’ve got more stored as well, so that if horse number three (who is a baby and may be sold if we don’t get on when he’s ridden) stays with me and gets a place in my heart with the other two, I can have one done with all three of them.
Also popular for those who play a bowed instrument (like violin) and have horses in their life is the stringing of a bow with your horse’s hair, which is great because it’s a memento, artistic, and functional all at the same time. Of course, it does mean that eventually you will need to rehair your bow and lose that connection, so it’s more ephemeral than hair art, but a nice practice all the same.
I was just coming down to post that. It is absolutely the norm in the horse world, at least in the US. I know lots of people with bracelets, keychains and pendants made with hair from their horses (living and dead).
Laws, CA has a museum with many Victorian era artifacts, and when I was last there they had a large exhibit of hair art. If you live in California or Nevada and sometimes drive up to Mammoth or Reno via the East of the Sierras route (highway 395) it’s east to stop and visit. Voted best museum in Inyo County! Although the bar might be pretty low for that brag, but still, it was nice : http://www.lawsmuseum.org/index.htm
I have a Thing to try to visit all of the California counties and was just wondering what I would do for Inyo! Now to wonder about Colusa….
Independence, Missouri (a suburb of Kansas City) has Leila’s Hair Museum! It’s not entirely devoted to mourning jewelry, but she’s got a pretty big collection of it, too, plus a lot of other random weirdness in the category of All Things Hair. She herself is a hoot, and it’s always fun to take unsuspecting friends there because there’s always at least one person in any group who has a THING about hair. A squicked-out, EEEWW sort of thing.
we have two hair wreaths hanging in the lobby of the museum. I love them! Most people don’t even realize that it’s hair until we point it out.
I have a few pieces of mourning jewelry I bought in junk shops as a gothy teen and wore to bits. Sadly, that “to bits” is literally true of the few pieces I would still happily wear: I have some gorgeous jet pins and earrings that are just too bashed up to wear any longer, but I can’t bear to get rid of them (or to pay to have them repaired). I also have a few brooches of woven hair under glass, and they’re quite lovely and delicate. One of them even has little coiled elements of … well, it’s like filigree, but it’s made of stiffened hair, so it’s decaying a bit by now.
Antimacassars […] were originally intended to prevent men from staining the backs of upholstered furniture with their oily hairdos—hence “anti-Macassar [oil].”.
I remember learning this for the first time and actually feeling the satisfying CLICK of information sliding into place in my brain — and then gradually getting infuriated because my previous exposure to antimacassars inevitably involved men (either in real life or in antiquated books) poking gentle fun at the women who used them.
Realizing that those mocking men were making fun of a device specifically designed to protect expensive household pieces from their own heads filled me with rage and made me ruminate, possibly for the first time, on the cyclical injustice with which domestic responsibilities as assigned to women. I’d previous considered how unfair it is for women to bear a disproportionate domestic burden, but the cruel irony of men snickering at antimacassars brought home to me how we’ll be judged harshly either way: if the household furniture is stained by men’s hair oil, we’re to blame. If we put in place handknitted doilies to prevent the staining, we’re too, too precious and persnickety.
I loved that tidbit, too. I enjoy reading about how vain men in the Ye Olde Days were, given the association of unkemptness with masculinity these days.
I’ve been in a house where they could have seriously used an antimacassar on the husband’s favorite armchair, man. Big black head-sized stain.
I always wear black to a funeral, too. It just feels like the right thing to do, somehow. (For me, that is – I don't care how others dress at funerals!)
After 9/11/01, when I was 21, I wore black for several days afterward, because the enormity of the loss seemed to call for it.
This is so cool! I find the whole elaborate etiquette around mourning really fascinating — it’s such a great reminder that the way we do things now is just as arbitrary and fleeting. Like, people have a tendency to think The Way Things Are Done is the way they’ve always been done, but no. There used to be hair jewelry.
I once moved cross country for a job, and was offered and accepted to live with connected to the job for free, which was great! I found out when I arrived that I was actually going to be living in my boss’ spare bedroom (weird!), which she had decorated with tiny manikins wearing Victorian dresses and these lovely framed floral sculptures. I asked her about them, since the fact that they were made in black and tan twists of something caught my eye, and she was so proud when she said “Oh, that’s an heirloom! It’s made from the hair of several of my ancestors.” There were three such pieces, all around the bed.
I didn’t sleep for a week. Every time I dozed off, I thought the tiny lady in the purple gown next to my bed was going to try to take my hair. Good times!
I gave my husband a lock of my hair when we were first dating. He might still have it around somewhere.
When our long-haired cat died, we kept a clump of his fur as a keepsake. We seriously discussed having it incorporated into a memorial fiber piece, but decided we preferred it in its original state. We did commission a Kitty memorial cord from a local fiber artist, but it’s wool only, no cat hair.
Granzella's in Williams! They have a morbid/fascinating collection of taxidermy animals in the bar, including insanely large bears.
I have a round leather box. Inside it is a long lock of my mother’s hair, from when she first cut her long hair off into a bob, and a lock of my hair from when I did the same thing. I really wish my sister had kept a lock of hair from when SHE did the same thing, but she thinks it’s creepy. Wevs. Hair is cool.
This is AMAZING.
Number one, I loved this article – so fascinating. I remember there being a bit in Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym where the narrator is remembering her mother wearing black, then grey and then finally mauve in mourning. I love the idea of slowly becoming more colourful as you emerge from grief.
Number two, my daddy has some of our old cat’s whiskers in a little tin; he used to use them to pick up paint samples because they’re the only things which are both thin and stiff enough. My mummy used to call it his Mourning Tin.
My mom is a great lover of estate jewelry. When I was in high school, she came home with a delicate oblong glass and gold brooch, smaller than a thumb. The pin on the back is fragile and old school. The flat glass front is bordered in black and gold enamel. Inside, pressed under the glass, is the most amazing braid of hair, looped in something like a inventive endless celtic knot. It’s two different kinds of hair, a brunette lock and a slightly blonder lock, woven together. It is amazing.
She explained to me what it was and I was horrified, like a proper high schooler. WTF MOM? We don’t really know the story. She thinks its a mother’s hair with the hair of a child that died. Because childhood mortality. Jesus. But now I love it. Although it’s not really wearable. If people ask what it is, the explanation unsettles them.
“Oh this, just some dead people’s hair from the 1800’s. I know rite? No we’re not related to them but somebody was. Hahaha. Isn’t it great? Don’t touch it.”
It’s kind of like those poignant b&w daguerrotypes in antique shops. You may take one home, but it feels funny if you hang it on your wall, since they’re not actually, you know, *your* ancestors. Just like those photos, it’s lost it’s story.