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Return of the Beehive
Sarah Mower recalls the heyday of the hairdo that needed frenzied backcombing and loads of lacquer
Whatever else troubled pop star Amy Winehouse has achieved – or thrown away in her addled binges – nothing should distract us from the vast importance of her beehive. The towering tumbleweed construction has become her trademark and has arguably played as big a role in her career as her musical talent. No matter how staggeringly out of it she seems, whatever the nightly carnage recorded by the paparazzi, that beehive still somehow remains Up There. It’s a do that has riveted a nation and changed hair fashion. Up and down the country, tailcombs and Elnett – the long–forgotten instruments of the art of backcombing – are suddenly vanishing from pharmacies. Every girl now wants the kind of lift not witnessed in quite this way since, as parents and grandparents will be amused to remember, Dusty Springfield in the first Top of the Pops in 1964, singing I Only Want To Be With You.
Amy Winehouse’s appeal to a cross–generational audience lies as much in her hair as in her Sixties–influenced sounds. One look at it, and Motown and Soul fans of the early Sixties will be flashing back to the Ronettes, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and the Supremes, and thinking, “Aaah”. Those were the days. A high point both in music and hair production. Youth and glamour, artifice and innocence, all poised at the split–second before the Fifties ended and the Sixties really got under way.
It happened, as Saga readers recall with great fondness, between 1960–63, a dizzy three years when Vogue was reporting rapid and ever more extreme inflation of hairstyles while every suburban teenager was busy working out how to get her bouffant to stay up while also perfecting the twist. Perhaps she’d been influenced by seeing London’s Mayfair hairdresser, Mr Raymond “Teasy–Weasy”, demonstrating flamboyant backcombing on his Saturday TV show – or more likely, by watching Ready, Steady, Go! All those glam girl–groups. Across the Channel, meanwhile, Alexandre de Paris was up to the same thing in a Frenchified haute couture sense, dressing the hair of models, society ladies and movie stars in ever more elaborately fanciful up–dos. Height, of course, being of the essence.
On the home front, as readers will remember, it was the heyday of lacquer and Amami Setting Lotion – or, if you couldn’t afford that, then domestic resource–fulness. Girls took to washing their hair in beer to make it stiffer and tackier, the better to hold a furiously back–combed beehive. Their mothers, able to afford a little more professional attention, might visit the local salon for a “Re–tease” and an extra dousing of hairspray to keep the edifice in place between washes, every two weeks or so.
When fashion goes to extremes, invention runs ahead. Just as the miniskirt later necessitated the invention of tights, or tight Lycra trousers brought about thongs, the big hair boom of the early Sixties was soon exploding into wigs and hairpieces. By 1962, Vogue was observing, “Most hairdressers are telling staff to cut down on backcombing and advising customers to buy false pieces… which add height and bulk more successfully.” Wearing fake hair swiftly became a normalised habit among the fashionable – the equivalent of today’s extensions. So much so that the Supremes put their names to a collection of ornate wigs (the evidence is in the fabulous exhibition of their lothes and memorabilia, collected by Mary Wilson, currently showing at the V&A).
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