Modern Living: Bag Wigs and Birds’ Nests

On that festive day in 1770 when the Dauphin Louis Auguste, now King Louis XVI, married Archduchess Marie Antoinette, all ladies of fashion gained a new bellwether—but they also lost one. During the wedding celebrations, Monsieur Legros de Rumigny, the Parisian cook turned coiffeur nonpareil, was accidentally smothered to death in a brawling crowd. The famed 38 styles described in Legros’s L’Art de la Coëffure des Dames Françoises had become de rigueur for all the best heads in Europe. But with the tastemaker gone, faddism has flourished—so much so that European ladies of fashion can now consult a 39-volume behemoth that illustrates no fewer than 3,774 current hair styles, many of them preposterous variations on the once decorous pompadour.

A woman who wants to be chic starts by having her hair stiffened with perfumed animal fat; the hair is then whitened with powder and molded over an egg-shaped wire frame usually 2-to 3-feet high. For daytime outings, this concoction is decorated with ribbons, feathers, flowers, birds’ nests or vegetables. After entertaining eleven young women recently, a London hostess boasted that “they had, amongst them, on their heads, an acre and a half of shrubbery, besides slopes, grass plots, tulip beds.”

Even more elaborate headdresses are preferred for evening wear. Among this season’s most popular styles are the “drowned chicken,” “chest of drawers,” “mad dog” and “sportsman in the bush.” Topical motifs are especially prized; one called “a I’inoculation “hails the controversial new treatment for the small pox. In an effort to reconcile propriety with fashion, a widow will occasionally sport a model of her dead husband’s tomb upon her head.

For the honor of serving as pedestals to these creations, the modishly coiffed ladies of the Continent are willing to suffer all manner of inconveniences. Doorways, chandeliers and closed carriages pose a constant challenge. Since the more fanciful styles take as long as four hours to sculpt, women often find it necessary to have them done the day before an important event and then sleep sitting up all night to preserve them. The coiffures are constructed to last three or four weeks; when cut open, they often emit a noxious effluvium and occasionally a living creature.

Although American women generally disdain to ape the more outrageous of foreign styles, a moderate version of the scaffolded look has become popular in the Colonies. Not long ago, the Boston Gazette ungallantly reported the plight of a young woman whose headdress was shattered when she was thrown from her carriage by startled horses. The stuffing fell onto the road, revealing an unsavory mixture of jute fiber, wool yarn, curled wool and hay.

Not to be outdone by their countrywomen, the notoriously foppish young men of London’s Macaroni Club (so named because of its members’ love of Continental food and fashions) have also begun sporting coiffures of enormous height. Most Englishmen, however, are turning to a more natural look. The cumbersome, bottom-heavy periwig, with its almost waist-length expanse of curls, has long since given way to a proliferation of shorter, more comfortable styles.

The trend seems even more advanced in the Colonies. The bag wig, with its black-silk sack to encase long braids, and the shorter bob wig, with neat rows of curls about the sides of the head, remain popular. But the wigless look, once associated with fashion iconoclasts like Benjamin Franklin, has already been adopted by no less a pacesetter than General Washington.