Utility hair
What do vintage fashion geeks do when they come home drunk on a Saturday night? Why, spend hours wandering through the British Pathé film archives, of course!
During the war, Pathé newsreels and short informational films were shown in cinemas before and between features. I love the arch, sometimes snarky commentary and the models’ rigid carriage and fixed smiles. Here’s an interesting short from 1942 on the new utility hairstyles, suitable for wear during war work or under a military cap. Pay attention to the vintage cutting and styling techniques:
These hairstyles look ridiculously fussy to us now, considering how long they took to set and maintain, but if you think about how much time a modern woman with even a wash-’n-go cut spends washing and drying her hair (daily? every two days?), it probably evens out to much the same amount of time spent by wartime women with liberty cuts who only washed their hair once a week or so. They arguably got more stylish results, but we have less cause to worry about “unwanted guests”. [Warning: head-scratchy horrors below.]
See now when I come home drunk I watch fashion shows like Project Runway or maybe a documentary like Coco Before Channel, and then the next morning watch it again wondering why I’m not surprised by the ending. At about 2pm I usually realize I watched it the night before at 1am! teeehee.
For some reason my scalp is itching now… =) What a horrible thing to be shown just before a movie, must have been a bit hard to focus on the film afterwards.
The first film was a great inspiration! I hadn’t really understood the hair was that short in those WWII hair-do’s.
Like Amy the talk of hair and the film makes me want to set mine! It’a too early for a cut, but perhaps I’ll do a pincurl-set on Wednesday… Thanks for the inspiration!
all this talk about hair is making me want to do mine! I haven’t had too much time to play with it though and am waiting for my bangs to grow out. I did have my hair cut into a 40′s shape a few weeks ago when I got it cut. i love the horse shoe shape. I will try and work on it and let you know!
ps. I WANT the P’OB cd! Thanks for telling me about it!
*shudder* Now I itch all over. Those films are great, I’m going to have myself a little party at that website! Thanks!
I don’t think we have to worry so much about “unwanted guests” these days with pyrithrin in just about every store.
According to all the info I’ve read, frequent washing doesn’t prevent the little pests anyway. I grew up in the sixties and weekly washing was the norm. I never had any “unwanted guests” even though I had LONG hair. FWIW, kitty