A La Mode – Part Four
The Peruke
One of the most notable fashion accessories of the 17th and 18th centuries was the peruke or powdered wig.
Long hair was a symbol of wealth and status. After all, if you were engaged in dirty, manual labour, the last thing you wanted was your flowing mane getting in the way. Loss of hair was a source of social embarrassment, as Samuel Pepys noted in his diary; “if [my brother] lives, he will not be able to show his head – which will be a very great shame to me.”
And why would the loss of hair be life-threatening and socially embarrassing? Because it was a sign of syphilis which by the 1580s had reached epidemic proportions in Europe with, according to William Clowes, an “infinite multitude” of syphilis patients clogging the hospitals of London. To hide the tell-tale stigma – although other giveaways were open sores, rashes, blindness and dementia – victims took to wearing wigs, simple affairs constructed from horse, goat or human hair. Some were scented with lavender or orange to mask any unseemly odours.
What moved the wig from medical prosthetic to fashion accessory was the discovery by Louis XIV in 1655 that at the age of 17 he was getting thin on top. To hide his bald spots he hired 48 wig makers to design ever more extravagant structures. His sycophantic court followed suit and five years later Charles II, bedevilled with his own tonsorial issues, introduced the fashion to the English court.
Wigs escalated in price – an everyday peruke would set you back 25 shillings and the most elaborate could costs as much as £40 – and so were seen as a statement of wealth. They were also practical because in order to wear one you had to have your head shaved. That meant that the ubiquitous head lice had to decamp from your head, where delousing was time-consuming and painful, to your wig. To get rid of them, you sent your wig off to a wig maker who would boil it, thus removing the troublesome mites.
The finest wigs were white in colour but these were out of the reach of all but the wealthiest and so from around 1715 the practice was to dust them with powder made from starch or flour. It was a messy process, a special room being reserved for the purpose to contain the dust and special dressing gowns were worn to minimise the damage to clothing.
So common was the practice of powdering that not to do so was a social black mark, as Georgiana Cavendish revealed in her novel, The Sylph, published in 1778; “Monsieur bowed and shrugged..In a moment I was overwhelmed with a cloud of powder. What are you doing? I don’t mean to be powdered, I said. Not powdered, repeated Sir William, why you would not be so barbarous as to appear without – it is positively not decent.” In her journal for 1780 Mary Frampton noted, “at that time everybody wore powder and pomatum.”
There were perils to wearing a wig. Boys were employed to secrete themselves in dray wagons and snatch a wig from a passer-by. By the time they had realised that they were minus their peruke – often someone would detain them on the pretence of offering assistance – the thief would make good their escape.
What did for the peruke was the French Revolution – it wasn’t safe for aristos to draw attention to themselves by wearing a wig – and in 1795 William Pitt’s imposition of a tax on hair powder on this side of La Manche. Short hair became the fashion.
