Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Hair-raising

Hairdressing as a marker of social change doesn’t often get its due. This little exhibition at The Civic, Barnsley, is an attempt to put that right

One of the best things about Beehives, Bobs and Blow-dries — yep, an exhibition about hairdressing — is the reaction of visitors. Some are getting on a bit and their pangs of recognition as they pass 1970s straightening tongs or Carmen heated rollers are evident. One woman exclaimed, as she passed a Ronson hairdryer with its shower-cap hood, ‘Ooh, they were good, they were. We’ve only just got rid of my mum’s.’ A hairdresser called Keith from Wakefield observed of the Beatles era that it was a worrying time to begin with: ‘Nothing happened for about two or three months. Nobody came. We thought we’d lost our business. But it turned out that the men were just growing their hair. They came back when it was shoulder length.’

The thing about hair is that we’ve all got it — well, most of us — and how we handle it, cut it, style it, treat it, colour it, says lots about us, and about the age. Yet hairdressing as a marker of social change doesn’t often get its due. This little exhibition at the Civic, Barnsley, is an attempt to put that right. It’s a bid to summarise the art, science and politics of hair from the 1950s to our own time, from the beehive to transgender salons (yep, non-binary), in a small space.

Quite a lot of room is given over to the portfolio of Andrew Barton, the local Barnsley boy made good as British Hairdresser of the Year (2006). But it’s the artefacts of hairdressing that are so captivating: the hood dryers, the Wella machine with what look like dozens of scary electrodes, the jars and jars of Brylcreem; the hairnet proudly advertised as being made of human hair; the West Indian castor oil.

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