'Ruffianly, Graceless & Whorish'?: The Restoration Periwig
In 1628, one young man felt that the follies of fashion had gone too far. So much so, in fact, that he felt inclined to pen a sixty-three page treatise furiously condemning the "Ruffianly, Graceless, Whorish, Ungodly" (& 25 other insulting remarks) manner in which many men were choosing to wear their hair. In The Unloveliness of Lovelocks, William Prynne expressed his disgust at these "unnatural and unmanly times" in which men had "broken the very Ordinance... of God, and Nature, by their womanish... False, excessive hair." The gent below, adding a flourish of ribbons and feathers to his flowing locks, doesn't do much to disprove his point. Prynne's was not a lone voice, and presumably their grumblings softened when revolution and puritanism heralded distinctly less extravagant times.
Unfortunately for Prynne, the Restoration was to revive pomp and parade with a vengeance, and he lived to see the 1660s transform the English court into a sea of lavish tumbling periwigs. The fashion first took root in early seventeenth-century France, reportedly after Louis XIII's attempts to conceal his premature baldness had inspired a scramble to emulate him. When Charles Stuart returned from his exile in France to assume the English crown, the trend spread quickly, but as these expensive full-bottomed wigs remained the preserve of the elites, they offered an immediate indicator of wealth, status and prestige.
But the popularisation of false hair, and the wearer's preference of colour, size and shape, often raised a fashionable eyebrow or two (which, by the by, might also nothing more than meticulously styled mouse-hair ceremoniously applied to the face). As a consequence of the growing prevalence of wig-wearing, deportment was key – any gentleman sporting an unkempt hairpiece could be immediately branded an eccentric, an outsider, or a pretender to gentility. The idea of the peruke being a disguise for an "empty head" became a common attack, and satirists such as Tom Brown (1662-1704) never missed an opportunity to poke fun at these absurd creatures: "One made a most magnificent figure: his periwig was large enough to have loaded a camel, and he bestowed upon it at least a bushel of powder I warrant you."
Clearly, although some considered the full-bottomed wig a fantastic coiffed ornament to the human head, others saw them as ridiculous, or even an unchristian attempt to thwart God's design of the body. A sudden attack of conscience on this count prompted former perruquier Mr John Mulliner to renounce his profession and burn his own wig as "a Testimony for God against them" in 1677.
But those who conformed to the trend must have suffered in the name of fashion. The wigs inevitably became heavier and more ungainly as size became a measure for quality. The majority of them were fashioned from human hair (and often women's hair, introducing a whole host of objections on the grounds of distortion of gender roles) and were perenially lice-infested. Aside from the heat, the scratching, and the inevitable smell, "big-wigs" became a favourite target of thieves, and wig-snatching was as lucrative an enterprise as pick-pocketing. It seems that some young ne'er-do-wells perfected a strange method of robbing the rich in broad daylight. A thief passing through a crowd carried on his head a young boy concealed in a basket, who could easily spy the most attractive hairpieces and snatch them from his victim's head before ducking back out of sight.
Diarist Samuel Pepys was sufficiently enamoured of his periwig to worry about its fate in the aftermath of the plague of 1665, noting "what will be the fashion after the plague is done, as to periwigs, for nobody will dare to buy any haire for feare of the infection, that it had been cut off the heads of the people dead with the plague". (This, added to the fact that Pepys' primary concern during the the Great Fire of London the following year was to make sure his parmesan cheese was safely buried, suggests to me that the man occasionally had trouble prioritising. His portrait of 1686 is the second image at the bottom).
In any case, he had little need to worry. As the eighteenth-century dawned, the man's periwig became such a necessary accessory that a bald-headed man could strike horror into the hearts of a genteel company of swooning, nay, screaming ladies. Propelled by blossoming economic markets and the introduction of cheaper models, elements of fashion were becoming an increasingly universal concern. The wig was continually recast in both its style and its function, but maintained a prominent and visible role in English culture until the end of the eighteenth century, often seeming to hold as much power and personality as the "weak brains they kept warm." Or, perhaps even more so, as the following contemporary remark suggests:
"A HEAD is a mere bulbous excrescence, growing out from between the shoulders, to fill up the hollow of a wig."
Inspired by Restoration England by Peter Furtado, Shire Living Histories (2010)
