Well-off women in interwar Britain were told that the state of their hair was an important consideration. Throughout the interwar period, different hairstyle trends followed one another and for the fashion-conscious woman, it was easy to be considered completely démodé if sporting the wrong style. Short hairstyles were favoured, which required less daily maintenance and upkeep than the traditional Edwardian long hairstyles. Film stars showed off these new trends to the wider public, enhancing their aspirational qualities.
The bobbed haircut made a big impact in the early 1920s, aided by American film stars such as Clara Bow (the original ‘It girl’) and Louise Brooks.[1] Brooks in particular cut her bob very short. In British film, the bob perhaps most famously appears in 1929s Piccadilly, where Anna Mae Wong’s character Shosho wears her hair in the style. Wong was an American actress, and her character Shosho was Chinese and is constantly ‘othered’ in the film, aligning the bobbed hairstyle with a dangerous exoticism.
By the mid-1920s, however, the bob had generally been replaced by the ‘shingled’ hairstyle, an even shorter cut that exposed the wearer’s neck. In the 1928 novel Keeping Up Appearances there are frequent reminders that the novel’s heroine, Daisy/Daphne, wears her hair shingled. It would appear to be the perfect hairstyle for a character who is a journalist and a single woman living independently in London, mixing with a ‘fast set’ of drinking friends and trying to find her own way in life. Daisy is frequently asked to write for her newspaper on the ‘Post-War Girl’, a stereotype which she herself embodies and which would commonly be assumed to wear her hair short.[2]
Shingled hair was much more complicated to achieve than a regular bob, and would require the wearer to undergo frequent and extensive treatment in a beauty salon. In interwar London, hairdresser for women often operated as part of a beaty parlour, where customers could also get manicures and other treatments. Whereas the bob had been very achievable for working-class women, shingled hair denoted someone who could spend time and money on its maintenance.
In the 1930s, hairstyles got longer again, and the most important thing to achieve was a ‘wave’. The ‘Marcel wave’, although patented in the 1870s, remained fashionable. It required the application of heated tongs onto a woman’s hair, to set it in long-lasting waves. This operation, which needed to be undertaken in a professional parlour, could be hazardous for the customer. E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady visits a hairdresser for a ‘permanent wave’ in The Provincial Lady Goes Further, which originally appeared in 1932:
Undergo permanent wave, with customary interludes of feeling that nothing on earth can be worth it, and eventual conviction that it was. The hairdresser (…) assures me that I shall not be left alone whilst the heating is on, and adds gravely that no client ever is left alone at that stage – which has a sinister sound, and terrifies me. However, I emerge safely, and my head is also declared to have come up beautifully – which it has.[3]
The Provincial Lady, by the way, always gets her hair done in London, and indeed often resolves to visit the hairdresser immediately upon her arrival in the capital, when she sees that fashions have changed since her last visit.[4] In rural Devon, where she normally resides, hairstyles are evidentially not subject to the whims of fashion, but in the big cities women are expected to keep up with changing expectations.
The beauty parlour appears in some interwar films, most notably Anthony Asquith’s thriller A Cottage on Dartmoor. In this film, the protagonists are Joe, a barber’s assistant, and Sally, a manicurist, who both work in the same salon. Joe is in love with Sally and pursues her doggedly, but Sally does not reciprocate his feelings and is disturbed by Joe’s persistence. When a male customer from the countryside enters the salon, he and Sally fall in love at first sight. Joe’s jealousy leads him to murderous intent. The forced proximity of the trio in the salon, where Joe has to work on his rival’s hair and observe Sally touching the man’s hands as she delivers his manicure, ratchets up the tension.
On a lighter note, the male love interest in the Gracie Fields film Looking on the Bright Side also works as a hairdresser in a beauty parlour. In this film, Fields maximises the comic opportunities of the environment, with water, soap and complicated hairdressing machines all playing a part in a key slapstick scene.
For women who could not afford to go to the beauty parlour, home treatments such as the heavily-marketed ‘Amami’ shampoo offered a solution. Under the slogan ‘Friday Night is Amami Night’ customers were encouraged to use the brand’s ‘shampoo and set’ products every week, to achieve that elusive ‘wave.’ No matter if you visited a high-end beauty salon, or used at-home products, if you wanted to be a fashion-conscious woman in interwar London you had to spend time, money and effort to ensure that your hair passed muster.
[1] Anna Cottrell, ‘Deathless Blondes and Permanent Waves: Women’s Hairstyles in Interwar Britain’, Literature and History, vol. 25, no. 1 (2016), 22-40, p. 28
[2] Rose Macaulay, Keeping Up Appearances (London: British Library, 2022 [1928]), p. 25
[3] E. M. Delafield, The Provincial Lady Goes Further, (London: Penguin, 2013 [1932]), p. 140
[4] Ibid., p. 228
Interwar London 