Des cheveux et des poils

Catalog for the exhibition “Des cheveux et des poils” presented at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris from April 5 to September 17, 2023.

For centuries, hairstyles and human hair, along with clothing, jewelry and accessories, have played a part in the construction of appearances. At the frontier between fashion and the representation of the body, the subject leaves no one indifferent.
In Western culture, both shaggy hair and excessive body hair have often been associated with the devil, the animal and the wild man. So much so that, for centuries, civilized men and women have had to comb, tame and sometimes even conceal their fleece.
Because hair is a bodily material that can be transformed in a thousand and one ways – stretched, cut, complemented, colored, adorned, hidden or displayed – it is an essential element of self-staging, displaying adherence to a fashion, a conviction, a protest, and carrying many meanings, such as femininity, virility, negligence, etc.

The names of a few famous hairstyles – Fontanges, Titus, garçonne, Iroquois, etc. – reveal that hair is also an essential part of any hairstyle. – reveal that hair is also the object of veritable fashion phenomena, the bearer of social and cultural codes that contemporaries of every era know how to decipher.

From the end of the Middle Ages to the present day, this book addresses a number of themes inherent to the history of hairstyling (combed, cut and adorned hair; wigs, hairpieces, baldness; coloring), not forgetting issues linked to facial hair (beardless faces, beards, moustaches, eyebrows) and body hair (torso, legs, pubic area, armpits, depilation). The use of hair to make jewelry, the glory of superstar hairdressers and the use of hair in haute couture are other themes that will offer the reader many surprises.