The hairdresser: a social history of a trade
It is a trade with almost no barrier to entry, a habit of technical revolution, and a strange relationship to the idea of the artist. Its history is largely undocumented because nobody thought to write it down.
Hairdressing developed out of wigmaking and barbering into a distinct trade over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Marcel Grateau's heated tong waving in the 1870s, Karl Nessler's permanent waving apparatus demonstrated in London in 1906, and cold waving from the 1930s each transformed the technical basis of the work. In Britain the trade became a major route into skilled paid employment for working class women. It remains legally unregulated, with registration voluntary under the 1964 Act.
Combs are among the most common personal objects in archaeological collections, made of bone, antler, horn, wood, ivory and later of vulcanite and plastic, and their form has changed remarkably little in several thousand years. Somebody has always dressed hair. What is comparatively recent is doing it as a specialised paid occupation for people outside your own household.
The wig century
The trade's immediate ancestor in Europe is wigmaking, and the wig is a bigger subject than it looks. From the mid seventeenth century the wig became standard formal wear for men of the upper and professional classes across much of Europe, and an entire skilled trade grew up around it: sourcing human hair, cleaning and sorting it, weaving it onto a foundation, dressing, curling, powdering, storing and maintaining.
That trade was substantial, organised and, in France, guild regulated. It was also international, with human hair moving considerable distances as a commodity, a trade that has never stopped and that raises the same questions about supply and consent now that it did then.
The decline of the powdered wig in Britain has a documented proximate cause that is unusually satisfying. In 1795 a duty was imposed on hair powder, requiring those who used it to obtain an annual certificate. The tax was a revenue measure. Its effect, combined with shifting fashion and the political associations of powder in the years after the French Revolution, was to accelerate a decline already underway. Wearing powder became both expensive and a statement, and it did not survive as ordinary practice.
The technical revolutions
Hairdressing as a distinct trade separated from barbering and wigmaking during the nineteenth century, and it did so around a specific technical capability: producing durable waves and curls in hair that did not naturally have them.
Marcel waving. In the 1870s the French hairdresser Marcel Grateau developed a method of waving hair using heated tongs in a particular technique, producing a deep regular wave that became enormously fashionable and carried his name for decades. It required considerable skill and it did not survive washing.
Permanent waving. Karl Nessler, working in London under the name Charles Nestle, demonstrated an apparatus for permanent waving in 1906. The method involved winding hair on rods, applying an alkaline preparation and heating it, and the early versions were heavy, hot, slow and capable of causing burns. The principle, chemically breaking and reforming the bonds that give hair its shape, is the basis of everything that followed.
Cold waving. From the 1930s, methods using thioglycolate chemistry at room temperature removed the heat and the apparatus. This is the perm as most people know it, and it made the service faster, cheaper, safer and available in any salon without capital equipment.
Each of these transformed the trade's economics. Marcel waving created a skilled service. Permanent waving created a capital intensive one. Cold waving democratised it and produced the mid century high street salon.
- The claim
- Vidal Sassoon invented the bob and freed women from setting and rollers.
- Where it appears to come from
- Sassoon's influence was real and substantial, his geometric cutting of the 1960s was genuinely innovative, and he was an exceptionally effective communicator about his own work. Popular accounts have compressed a change in cutting technique into the invention of short hair for women.
- What is actually established
- Established: the bob was widely worn from the 1910s and became emblematic of the 1920s, four decades before Sassoon's salon work. Established: Sassoon developed and popularised precision geometric cutting in which the shape is created by the cut itself rather than by setting, which was a substantial technical and commercial shift. Established: his approach reduced dependence on weekly setting appointments. Not established: invention of the bob or of short hair, both of which have a long prior history including a well documented and much discussed vogue in the 1920s.
Who did the work
The social significance of hairdressing in Britain is chiefly about employment. Across the first half of the twentieth century it became one of the principal routes by which working class girls entered skilled paid work outside domestic service, factory work and shop work.
The apprenticeship was long, poorly paid and frequently exploitative, involving years of sweeping, shampooing and unpaid or barely paid labour before any cutting. What it led to was a trade that could be practised anywhere, that required no capital beyond tools, and that could be done from home, around children, in the evenings, in a front room, which mattered enormously to women whose working lives were interrupted.
Hair itself has attracted more regulation than any other aspect of appearance, a subject taken up in the essay on the politics of hair. The trade also produced its own celebrity structure, unusually early. Named hairdressers with public reputations existed in the eighteenth century and have existed ever since, and the tension between the trade as skilled manual work and the hairdresser as artist runs through its entire modern history. It is visible in the language: stylist, creative director, artistic team, session work.
Every technical revolution in this trade made the work faster, and every one of them was followed by a fashion that required more of it.
A trade that stayed open
As noted in the essay on the salon, hairdressing in the United Kingdom is not a regulated profession. The Hairdressers Registration Act 1964 established a voluntary register, and campaigns to make registration mandatory have recurred without success.
The arguments are worth setting out because they are genuinely balanced. Chemical services can cause real injury: scalp burns, hair loss and severe allergic reactions to hair dye components are all documented, and dye related sensitisation is a recognised occupational and consumer health issue. On the other side, licensing raises the cost of entry to a trade that has been, for a century and a half, one of the few open doors into skilled self employment for people without capital or formal education. Whichever way one comes down, the trade off is real and it is not resolved by asserting that safety matters.
What has changed, and what has not
The independent salon has been squeezed from both ends, by chains with buying power on one side and by chair renting and home working on the other. The rise of the self employed stylist renting a chair, or working entirely from home and booking through social media, is a genuine structural change and it returns the trade to something close to its nineteenth century condition: an individual with tools, a clientele and no institution behind them.
What has not changed in any of this is the fundamental transaction. Someone sits down, someone else stands behind them with a comb, and for a fixed period a person is handled, listened to and altered. It is one of the oldest services there is, and the technology around it, for all the revolutions, is still a pair of shears and a set of teeth cut into a strip of material.
Where to look
Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.
Questions readers send us
When did hairdressing separate from barbering?
Gradually across the nineteenth century, as a distinct trade organised around dressing, waving and curling rather than cutting and shaving. Wigmaking was the other parent trade, and its decline in the early nineteenth century pushed practitioners towards dressing natural hair.
What was Marcel waving?
A technique developed by the French hairdresser Marcel Grateau in the 1870s, using heated tongs in a specific manipulation to produce a deep regular wave. It required considerable skill and did not survive washing, which is why permanent waving was so commercially significant.
Who invented the permanent wave?
Karl Nessler, working in London under the name Charles Nestle, demonstrated a permanent waving apparatus in 1906. The early machines were heavy, hot and slow, and capable of causing burns. Cold waving using thioglycolate chemistry, from the 1930s, removed the heat and the apparatus.
Why did powdered wigs go out of fashion in Britain?
Several reasons combined, but the proximate one is documented: a duty on hair powder introduced in 1795 required an annual certificate to use it. Combined with changing fashion and the political associations of powder after the French Revolution, it accelerated a decline already in progress.
Do hairdressers need a qualification in the UK?
No. There is no legal requirement to hold a qualification or to register in order to practise. Registration under the 1964 Act is voluntary, and repeated campaigns to make it compulsory have not succeeded.
- Victoria and Albert Museum Combs, wigs, dress and the material culture of grooming.
- British Library Hairdressing trade press, manuals and apprenticeship literature.
- legislation.gov.uk The Hairdressers Registration Act 1964 and the eighteenth century hair powder duty.
- Science Museum Group Waving apparatus, salon equipment and the chemistry of hair treatment.
- Museum of London London trades and working life collections.
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