Ancient use of Human Hair Wigs
Wigs 17th century
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the use of wigs fell into abeyance in the West for
a thousand years until revived in the 16th century as a means of compensating for hair
loss or improving one's personal appearance. They also served a practical purpose: the
unhygienic conditions of the time meant that hair attracted head lice, a problem that
could be much reduced if natural hair were shaved and replaced with a more easily de-loused artificial hairpiece. Fur hoods were also used in a similar preventative fashion.
18th century
In the 18th century, men's wigs were powdered in order to give them their distinctive white or off-white color. Contrary to popular belief, women in the 18th century did not wear wigs, but wore a coiffure
supplemented by artificial hair, or hair from other sources. Women mainly powdered their hair grey, or blue-ish grey, and from the 1770s onwards never bright white like men.By the 1780s, young men were setting a
fashion trend by lightly powdering their natural hair, as women had already done from the 1770s onwards.
After 1790, both wigs and powder were reserved for older, more conservative men, and were in use by ladies
being presented at court. After 1790 English women hardly powdered their hair anymore. In 1795, the British
government levied a tax on hair powder of one guinea per year. This tax effectively caused the demise of both
the fashion for wigs and powder. Granville Leveson-Gower, in Paris during the winter of 1796, noted "The word citoyen seemed but very little in use, and hair powder
being very common, the appearance of the people was less democratic than in England.
19th and 20th centuries
The wearing of wigs as a symbol of social status was largely abandoned in the newly created
United States and France by the start of the 19th century. In the United States, only the first
five Presidents since George Washington until James Monroe wore powdered wigs according to the
men's fashion of the eighteenth century.
Women's wigs developed in a somewhat different way. They were worn from the 18th century onwards,
although at first only surreptitiously. Full wigs in the 19th and early 20th century were not
fashionable. They were often worn by old ladies who had lost their hair.During the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century hairdressers in England and France did a brisk business supplying postiches, or pre-made small wiglets, curls, and false buns to be incorporated into the hairstyle. The use of postiches did not diminish
even as women's hair grew shorter in the decade between 1910 and 1920, but they seem to have gone out of fashion
during the 1920s.