Thursday, October 27, 2011

The Wind-Blown Bob

Musique - "Fascinating Rhythm" by Fred and Adele Astaire
I was re-reading Fate Keeps on Happening by Anita Loos and had to laugh at the following excerpt from "It's All a Plot of the Hairdressers" (written in the voice of Lorelei Lee):
So now let us come to the Behavior Pattern which was evolved by the Economic Trends of the Nineteen Twentys. And this pattern had its basic foundation in the fact that young girls who became addicted to bootleg Gin were enclined to develop quite high spirits, particularly in the Speakeasies, where most of a young girl's time was whiled away.
And now we come to the observation that these high spirits had a tendency to cause disarrangement of both the garments and the coiffeur. And, since Fashion is invaritably influenced by a girl's Mode of living, a Flapper, in order to always appear modish while badly groomed, solved the problem by going to the root of the matter and getting herself dishevelled on purpose before she ever started out, which resulted in the Birth of the Wind-Blown Bob.
The picture above is from a hairdresser's book, but it looks too neat to be "wind-blown" to me—it's not nearly disheveled enough. When I think of women of the 1920s messing up their hair (stylishly, of course) before going out, I picture something like Clara Bow:
In any case, I'm glad disheveled hair is something that's come back in style (again). I'm going to start to refer to my own hair as a "wind-blown bob". :)