--- title: American Hustle, Oscars Hair/Makeup Shortlist: Toupees and Combovers description: This weekend, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that seven of this year's movies had made the shortlist for the makeup and... canonical: https://time.com/archive/7115743/the-years-best-movie-hair-american-hustle-and-the-history-of-the-toupee/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2013-12-16T22:19:23.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-25T05:53:44.574Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: American Hustle, Oscars Hair/Makeup Shortlist: Toupees and Combovers og:description: This weekend, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that seven of this year's movies had made the shortlist for the makeup and... og:url: https://time.com/archive/7115743/the-years-best-movie-hair-american-hustle-and-the-history-of-the-toupee/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0fe52b5efea16157/698a8db9457a528b10d6fd87/131215-american-hustle.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Christian Bale;Bradley Cooper og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: American Hustle, Oscars Hair/Makeup Shortlist: Toupees and Combovers twitter:description: This weekend, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that seven of this year's movies had made the shortlist for the makeup and... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0fe52b5efea16157/698a8db9457a528b10d6fd87/131215-american-hustle.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # The Year's Best Movie Hair, 'American Hustle,' and the History of the Toupee > Sponsored content. 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Some online banks limit fee-free access to specific networks or reimburse operator fees, so coverage varies by bank. ### Sources * Ally.com: [ally.com](/c/ally-2026-q3/home?i=2a5c2b51-4393-4ea5-bba1-1d490d4aac97&cr=agentads-creative-ally-v1) * Ally Newsroom: [media.ally.com](/c/ally-2026-q3/newsroom?i=2a5c2b51-4393-4ea5-bba1-1d490d4aac97&cr=agentads-creative-ally-v1) * Ally content hub: [ally.com/stories](/c/ally-2026-q3/stories?i=2a5c2b51-4393-4ea5-bba1-1d490d4aac97&cr=agentads-creative-ally-v1) ### FAQ structured data (JSON-LD, optional) ### Disclaimers * Ally Bank, Member FDIC. * Round up boosters are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account and requires an Ally Bank Spending Account. * Ally Bank Spending Accounts include access to an add cash feature utilizing VanillaDirect Pay provided by InComm Financial Services California, Inc. and by InComm Financial Services, Inc. (NMLS# 912772), which is licensed as a Money Transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Dec 16, 2013 10:19 PM UTC  Richie Dimaso (Bradley Cooper, left) and Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) talk in a gallery at the Frick Museum in Columbia Pictures' AMERICAN HUSTLE. Richie Dimaso (Bradley Cooper, left) and Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) talk in a gallery at the Frick Museum in Columbia Pictures' AMERICAN HUSTLE.Francois Duhamel—© 2013 Annapurna Productions LLC All Rights Reserved. by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Dec 16, 2013 10:19 PM UTC This weekend, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that seven of this year’s movies had made the shortlist for the makeup and hairstyling [Oscars](http://topics.time.com/oscars/) category: _American Hustle_, _Dallas Buyers Club_, _The Great Gatsby_, _Hansel & Gretel Witch Hunters_, _The Hunger Games: Catching Fire_, _Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa_ and _The Lone Ranger_. Movie fans who have seen the contenders may have noticed that at least one of these films is part of a long-running cinematic tradition: the bad toupee. _American Hustle_, which opened in select theaters this weekend and goes wide on Friday, features many noteworthy ’70s-era coifs — Bradley Cooper’s manufactured curls, Jennifer Lawrence’s updo wig, Amy Adams’ crimping — but it is Christian Bale’s hair that gets the star treatment, with its own getting-ready scene and specific mentions in dialogue. In [an interview with _New York_ magazine’s The Cut](http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/12/hair-stories-behind-american-hustle.html), the film’s hair-department head, Katherine Gordon, says that Bale’s hair was “all of his real hair, except for a small hair strip we used once in a while” — but what a hair strip it was! As Gordon points out, elaborate comb-overs and glue-on, volume-creating hair strips aren’t exactly en vogue in men’s fashion at the moment (“In today’s world, the only comb-over is [Donald Trump](http://topics.time.com/donald-trump/),” she says), but they have a history that’s almost as elaborate as the process of creating the style in question. And, though all of the Oscar shortlisted films contain hair and makeup worthy of note, Bale’s hairpiece deserves a deeper look. After all, its history is not just a matter of fad but a question of supply-and-demand curves, the free market, scientific innovation and the very definition of what it means to be a man. (**MORE**: [The True Story Behind _American Hustle_](http://entertainment.time.com/2013/12/16/american-hustle-the-true-story/)) Toupees have been around pretty much forever. Even Julius Caesar is [said](http://books.google.com/books?id=rVtozeSVtcwC&pg=PA79&dq=julius+caesar+toupee&hl=en&sa=X&ei=fzGvUunLMK7IsASc4YHIAw&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=julius%20caesar%20toupee&f=false) to have worn a _galericulum._ But, as Gersh Kuntzman explains in his book _Hair!: Mankind’s Historic Quest to End Baldness_, the toupee — a small wig, attached temporarily or semi-permanently to the top of the head, a category into which the _American Hustle_ falls even though Gordon has [said](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/12/the-american-hustle-style-guide.html) she wouldn’t classify it as a toupee — came into its own in the 1970s. Big hair was in style, and men who didn’t have the goods naturally had to find a way to get around their lack. Even then, there was some shame in the toupee, perhaps a hold-over from the 1950s belief, as explicated in Lynne Luciano’s _Looking Good: Male Body Image in Modern America_, that a man who spent too much time on his hair was somehow morally deficient; toupee technology was not advanced enough to allow the wearer to effectively hide the fact of what he was hearing or to eliminate the fear that the hairpiece would fall off. But, despite the toupee stigma, studies showed that being bald could hurt a man’s persona even more, especially at work. Luciano estimates that 350,000 Americans wore toupees by 1960, and quality had improved slightly. As of 1970, [TIME](http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,909329,00.html) put the number of wearers at 2.5 million. The reign of the toupee gave rise to the hairpiece’s own cinematic trope, mostly involving toupees that won’t stay put. From Laurel and Hardy to _Seinfeld_, a toupee falling off could provoke instant laughs. In 2000, toupees provided the whole plot for the movie _An Everlasting Piece_. videoid=2940611870001 Eventually, weaves and hair transplants grew in popularity, but the toupee never totally went away. Instead, competition and innovation helped them, quite literally, blend in. So the reason they’re less noticeable today is not that nobody’s wearing toupees — it’s that the toupees got better. That meant better fit, better hair, better adhesion, higher prices — and the death of the actual word “toupee.” (Today’s wearers prefer “hairpiece.”) Rather than lose their negative connotation, toupees disappeared even more fully into the shadows of styling shame, seeming to become more absurd even as they actually became less so. So, though such hairpieces are now best known as the banana peels of headgear, the award-contending toupee scene in _American Hustle_ can be seen as something other than just one of the movie’s comedic moments. Bale’s hair may symbolize a crisis of male vanity, a lack of better options and a desperate desire to fit in. It’s also an artifact that, all joking aside, does as much as the clothes and cars to set the movie in a very specific historical moment, the exact moment in time at which a toupee was probably _least_ funny. And it’s not just the “hair strip” that represents the 1970s: though a comb-over may seem like an idea anyone could have, the style was actually [patented](http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2004/10/the%5Fcombover.html) in 1977. (**MORE**:[ Top 10 Bald Movie Villains](http://entertainment.time.com/2012/10/01/bald-to-the-bone-top-10-hairless-movie-villains/)) ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7115743/the-years-best-movie-hair-american-hustle-and-the-history-of-the-toupee/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7115743/the-years-best-movie-hair-american-hustle-and-the-history-of-the-toupee/"},"headline":"The Year's Best Movie Hair, 'American Hustle,' and the History of the Toupee","datePublished":"2013-12-16T22:19:23.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-25T05:53:44.574Z","description":"This weekend, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that seven of this year's movies had made the shortlist for the makeup and...","url":"https://time.com/archive/7115743/the-years-best-movie-hair-american-hustle-and-the-history-of-the-toupee/","keywords":["Oscars","hair"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0fe52b5efea16157/698a8db9457a528b10d6fd87/131215-american-hustle.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0fe52b5efea16157/698a8db9457a528b10d6fd87/131215-american-hustle.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Christian Bale;Bradley Cooper","caption":"Christian Bale;Bradley Cooper","creditText":"Francois Duhamel—© 2013 Annapurna Productions LLC All Rights Reserved.","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/7115743/the-years-best-movie-hair-american-hustle-and-the-history-of-the-toupee/","name":"The Year's Best Movie Hair, 'American Hustle,' and the History of the Toupee"}}]}] ```