Hollywood Hair: Masculine or Feminine?

Mary Pickford's rich and lustrous hair was the paradigm of female beauty in early Hollywood.

I’ve been looking at portraits of Hollywood stars from the 50’s, a time when the studio system was finally collapsing, and I noticed a few things.

The quality of studio portrait photography was dismal.

The images are, for the most part, bland, with little creative inspiration. Everyone seems bored–the photographers and the stars. Hollywood once employed geniuses like George Hurrell and C.S. Bull, whose iconic photography helped mold the G-d-like images of Hollywood’s golden age.

But as the studios were shrinking in power, they drastically cut back on their still departments. And because actors were no longer under long-term contract to the studios, the technocrat executives who replaced the original passionate moguls had no stake or ability to carefully shape and control the images of their most promising thespians.

Jean Harlow by George Hurrell

Gable, C.jpg Clark Gable by C.S. Bull

Since then, Hollywood stars have been shrinking at an incredible speed, eventually collapsing into what we have now: not movie stars, but tabloid celebrities who fight for media space with reality TV personalities, serial murderers and scandal choked, drug addled rock stars.

I also noticed hair.

Something was happening to the hairstyles of Hollywood stars in the 50’s. There was, in the cultural air, a reversal in the natural order of masculine and feminine. In the past, great Hollywood female stars were often defined by luxurious and cascading curls. But in the 50’s a startling number of Hollywood women submitted to a radical and often sexless ‘do.

The resulting images come uncomfortably close to evoking memories of post WWII photos of European women who were publicly humiliated, punished as German collaborators–their proud locks severely shorn, harshly clipped and plastered down into tight, impenetrable helmets.

But the men, like vain peacocks, display incredibly complex hair architecture–frequently built in layers like towering wedding cakes. The sensuality just drips from their rococo, thickly gelled cuts.

What was happening? Did the apocalyptic nature and mass slaughter of the Second World War turn fashion conscious Hollywood women into hard-to-define gamines? If so, a new generation of Hollywood men, with pillowy lips and come-hither eyes, stepped into the breach morphing into sexually charged male objects, yet seductively hinting at the inner female.

Here are a few samples:

Jeffrey Hunter, '52.jpg Robert Wagner, ’52