The bouffant

When stopped wearing hats and instead created headdresses from their tresses.

What about the beehive? My first grade teacher had one. Many of the styles of the 60s and 70s were just so fucking ugly, especially after the quite amazing styles of the 50s.

Older women stuck with the bouffant style because it added volume and made their thickening faces look longer and squat figures appear taller. And you could hide the face lift tape under piles of hair.

Margaret Thatcher

R3 nailed it

I think it’s tremendous!

R3 no wonder I've been wanting one!

The hat idea was one that had never occurred to me before. Thanks, r1.

Hats are expensive and difficult to store, and also hot in warm weather; a bouffant would have helped older women make the transition from wearing hats (de rigeur on the street for respectable Western women until the 1960s, when people finally realized how silly they were) to going hatless.

What would Marge be without one

The bouffant was an important trap for cigarette and crisco fumes

[quote]Hats are expensive and difficult to store, and also hot in warm weather; a bouffant would have helped older women make the transition from wearing hats (de rigeur on the street for respectable Western women until the 1960s, when people finally realized how silly they were) to going hatless.

Hats initially served a purpose: They protected the hair from soot and filth. A lot of cities and towns were pretty grimy into the 20th century.

Since most people in those days tended to walk to their destinations and only bathed once a week, naturally, they needed something to protect their heads. Thus, everyone (men, women, children) always wore a hat outdoors.

When cars replaced the horse-and-carriage and became affordable by the 1920s, hats ceased to be practical. However, hat-wearing continued on as a custom for another forty years, gradually going out of fashion with each decade, until becoming obsolete in the 1960s.

Car roofs becoming lower also contributed to the decline of hat-wearing, since they would get squashed.

Whenever the troubled shirttail relative Cora dropped into my grandma’s house, we knew if she had been hanging out down by the rail yard - her bouffant would be squished and reek of beer and smoke. She looked like a pulp fiction cover. Then, she’d clean up and wear one of my grandma’s nightgowns with drowned rat hair.

In later years, she was stuck with a bad bowl cut, but she was getting heavy meds and she didn’t care.

[quote]Since most people in those days tended to walk to their destinations and only bathed once a week, naturally, they needed something to protect their heads. Thus, everyone (men, women, children) always wore a hat outdoors.

I think people wore hats to protect them from the cold, the rain, and the sun.

R3 is correct but there's another reason: generally speaking, women tend to stick with the hairstyle that they felt was their most attractive look for the rest of their lives. My mother died in 1999 and up until the day she died she still had that bouffant hair that made her look really good in the 1960s and 1970s. By the end it looked a little like a rats' nest, but she didn't see that.

I'm going to adopt a pageboy/beehive combo that requires an architectural marvel of a cloche.

But what excuse is there for hair buns and stirrup pants?

Women who were middle-aged by the 60’s didn’t grow up in a culture where you washed your hair every morning. You kept your body clean with the use of shower caps and sponge baths, but you got your hair done once a week at the Beauty Parlor - a shampoo with a nice scrub, roller set / domed hair dryer and the tease and spray.

You may have to wrap it at night and give it a lift with rat-tail comb and some more spray each morning, but the culture gave status to middle class women with “done” hair who could afford the weekly expense.

My mother was religious when it came to her hair and make-up routine. Even when she became too frail to leave the house her stylist came by once a week to make sure Mom's hair was done.

It, like a neat bob, suggests that everything is under control.

Conservative girls still wore them up until the late-70's.

My mom hated my girlfriend's bouffant hairdo.

Practical question, did women do this every day or did they sleep with it? And if so how? How did it not get crushed and fall while sleeping on it?

People are inventive R22

They wrapped it in toilet paper - seriously. The paper absorbed grease and kept the shape.

Dawn Davenport shows how it was done.

I never would have guessed that, thanks R23 and R24

Toilet paper? How gauche.

I think hats looked good on women, however, white gloves were just creepy.

R23 Fuck, I remember it well. Walking into my Mums bedroom, to find her sleeping upright with her hair covered in toilet paper, so she could keep the look just one more day.

I once heard a story (urban legend?) where a woman with big hair was discovered to have lice eating into her skull.

Thelma Harper wrapped her head in toilet paper and a hair net.

The fabulous one-winged bouffant, being modeled here by Virginia Graham.

Can we talk...wiglets?

Wiglets and falls

OP- You’re a bit confused 🫤. The bouffant hairdo was still very popular among young women in 1966. Now three years later by 1969 it was definitely out of fashion because by then long straight hair was the fashion among young women.

Gloves on women lessened to possibility of sun spots.

And hide them as well.

*

Space Age

They thought it looked good. It was popular.

Volume was fashionable

Big hair was stylish!

There she is, Vonda Kay Van Dyke

An extreme example.

I got my hair did at Mr. Cunt's.

Sorry, r45, I will remain loyal to Mr. Clint.

You are forgetting it effectively came back in the 1980s, only this time the Big Hair was usually long, meaning that there would have been MORE backcombing and MORE hairspray required to get the height. In this picture, Cindy's hair is as high as her forehead, even with all that weight to drag it down.

Decades...

And, remember, the higher the hair, the closer to God.

Truth, r49...

Yeah, only nobody actually had that hair. It's like the styles you see in hair magazines today, where bangs and sidesweeps cover everyone's eyes and make them look like Sia.

[quote] My mom hated my girlfriend's bouffant hairdo.—Rokk Krinn

But then she got nuked, and that was that!

It was a very lower class to lower middle class look. No truly rich, fashionable women wore immense bouffants, just cheap, clueless broads. I’m sorry if you have a picture of your grandma with hair like this because it means she was a low-rent skank.

Jackie O was not low class

Lovely.

by Steiner

[quote]It was a very lower class to lower middle class look. No truly rich, fashionable women wore immense bouffants, just cheap, clueless broads. I’m sorry if you have a picture of your grandma with hair like this because it means she was a low-rent skank.

Elitist much?

Hippies had no use for the bouffant, and hair became a anti-establishment, sociopolitical statement.

Reminds me of the good old days, driving south through Seattle on I-5 and looking over to see the sign for Verna Beaver’s Designer Coiffures. Today’s Seattleites don’t begin to know how far the city has fallen.

I remember as late as the 1990s seeing wealthy older women on the UES wearing bouffants.

bubble cut

Yeah, Thatcher still wore it.

[quote] It was a very lower class to lower middle class look. No truly rich, fashionable women wore immense bouffants, just cheap, clueless broads.

You're a clueless idiot.

^^^Babe Paley was the most glamorous socialite in America and wore a bouffant.

Why do people post such idiotic things?

Gloria Guinness, one of the richest and most elegant women in the world in her heyday.

Brooke Astor.

You rang?

How did they look at each other and NOT burst out laughing ?

Imagine all those hairspray fumes in addition to cigarette smoke and leaded gas exhaust everywhere.

Whoa Nelly @ r68!

The fabulous socialite Deeda Blair still wears a modified version of a bouffant. She's absolutely ancient now and I believe she's the last surviving socialite of the CZ Guest/Lee Radziwill etc. era.

'62

It looked good at the time. It was new and fresh.

Just like how people 30 years from now will think the s wave, balayage hair styles will be ridiculous and ratty.

It’s still in style in places with sky high obesity rates.

What would you call this 'do on Miss Paula Stewart in an episode of Season 9 of "Perry Mason" (1965)?

Paula is best known for starring opposite Lucille Ball in "Wildcat" on Broadway and being married to Jack Carter.

Guuurl

"[R3] is correct but there's another reason: generally speaking, women tend to stick with the hairstyle that they felt was their most attractive look for the rest of their lives."

True! You can tell a lot of women's ages from their out-of-date hairstyles, whether it's a bouffant, 80s mall hair, or early 2000s skunk stripes.

The most spectacular example I'd ever seen was back in the 1970s, when I was a teen, and I saw this very old lady with genuine Mary Pickford hair! The same wavy hair with the blonde ringlets attached to a woman who must have been 90 years old, but the weird thing was that she was still doing what a lot of women had done back in the days before hair spray... hold the rows of waves in place with rows of bobby pins. Imagine how that looked in real life, a woman walking around in the post-bouffant Disco era, with this hairdo festooned with rows of bobby pins all over her head...

Paula & Swen

You see women in their 50s/60s who still have the big puffy 80s hair because that was when they were young and hot. It's very true that some people cling to the styles of their youth throughout their lives.

There is a purple zone in the MidWest in which Stevie Nicks’ 1985 makeup and hair is the norm. She created a generation that demands lip-gloss, feathered hair, and quilted black purses on a chain.

Yes r82, 80s Stevie Nicks is a touchstone for this kind of look.

r77, that's a classic bouffant.

[quote] She created a generation that demands lip-gloss, feathered hair, and quilted black purses on a chain.

And don't forget her influence on home decoration, too:

"Shawls draped over lampshades, casting medieval shadows into the night..."

--Sandra Bernhard

We had a thread some time ago about people who were stuck in the time when they were young and never changed their look, it was pretty insightful.

How may I help you?

The bump-it and pouf hair fads in the 2000s were a miniature bouffant revival.

My mother had exactly this hairdo in the 60s (is this a bouffant?) and a box full of hairpieces for added height, I guess. Even age 6 I thought it looked better without the backcomb - I remember hearing her on the phone saying "I must go to the hairdresser" and thinking, WHY? leave it be.

I once told her this years later and she said "Why didn't you tell me?" - imagine a 6 year old telling his mother to change her hairdo.

Actually, I rather like it now,

When did they start calling it "back combing"?

I remember older ladies (50s and up) having them in the 80s. They looked so dated, like poodle skirts or fedoras. My mom was 10 years younger than some of them and she had normal hair that she washed and styled before work every day. For special occasions she'd maybe use curlers abd hairspray to give it some volume but it was never these "salon set" monstrosities that had to be maintained through regular beauty appointments. These older women had hair the same volume and density as a motorcycle helmet. They must have needed weekly salon appointments at least, just to maintain them. Notably, most of them didn't work outside the home like my mom.

I remember my mother commenting on my first grade teacher’s beauty parlor hair, saying it looked like a brown football helmet.

r91 your post reminded me about a friend of my grandmother's, who had one of those Betty Ford style bouffants until the day she died in the late 2000s, when she was eightysomething. She went to the beauty parlor once a week to get her hair washed and styled and didn't wash it herself at home. My grandmother thought she was nuts for doing that. I imagine she was the last surviving client of that particular beauty parlor who still had an old-fashioned bouffant.

One of my favorite bits in "The Iron lady" is when Margaret Thatcher decides to stand for higher position in the Tory party, and her advisors convince her she needs "important hair" (which is why she gets her trademark bouffant)

I remember Truman Capote telling on anecdote on a late night television talk show about a woman in his hometown in Alabama mysteriously dying, and they found out she had several black widows that had somehow nested in her bouffant during the post mortem.

It was almost certainly made-up--he was a terrible liar.

That's just Southern gothic, r95.

We have forgotten the spider that lives in Della Reese’ skunk-do?

The B-52's used it effectively as camp.

So glad so ene remembered the gorgeous gals of the Faith Tones. One of them is a dead ringer for Stephen Fry with a bouffant.

I would think the bouffant had staying power as a hairdo for women of a certain age and social standing who no longer wanted to suffer through having sex with their husbands. The bedtime preparation of maintaining a bouffant was quite arduous.

I grew up in WASPy Long Island in the 70s and 80s. Nobody had that hair. However, our cruel and racist southern music teacher Miss Messicks arrived at each Fall and Spring concert sporting a bleach blonde beauty salon bouffant. God she was ugly, inside and out. How I loathed her.

I remember you, r101...you were always wetting your pants.

r101 I guess you never made it into Manhattan. Tons of society ladies with bouffants.

Is there a waspy part of Lawn Guyland?

The Hamptons. Montauk.

Oyster Bay

R104 - People who aren’t from around here don’t realize how huge Long Island is - it is 118 miles long and besides all the suburban towns to the east, all of both Brooklyn and Queens are part of Long Island geographically.

Long Island is isolated from the rest of the US so it has its own culture and dialect.

R53 is trying very hard to bury a humble past.

...did what?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but bouffants kind of morphed into these things by the late 60s or early 70s, didn't they. Are these called wiglets? All piled on top of each other? I remember my mom in about 1973-74 going to a fancy party with her hair done specially like this, except not so much on top of her head as going backwards from it.

"....going backwards from it?"

I'm sorry -- what?

Oh, r111, get a load of the architectural marvels on the heads of Mary and Anne at the '66 Emmys...

[quote]going backwards from it

Like this, only bigger.

r113, that's another reason why women loved bouffants and beehives--they were so much fun to have already created on wigs and then have them fastened to your head. An apparently complicated hairstyle was yours with no actual muss or fuss.

C'mon, who doesn't have a cascade in their wig wardrobe?

Does anyone else regularly spot fiftyish suburban women with some toned-down, wash-and-go version of the Rachel?

Bouffant has become a bit of a generic term for “big hair” - as seen on this thread. 80s blowdried and moussed extravaganzas weren’t bouffants; and there were some sub-types - like a beehive, that were always seen as extreme and a bit lower class / trashy.

From Wikipedia: The modern bouffant, considered by one source to have been invented by British celebrity hairdresser Raymond Bessone[1] was noted by Life in the summer of 1956 as being "already a common sight in fashion magazines."[2]

The style became popular at the beginning of the 1960s when First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy was often photographed with her hair in a bouffant, and her style was widely imitated.[3][4] Generally speaking, by the mid-1960s, many well-dressed women and girls were wearing some form of bouffant hairdo, which in one variation or another remained the fashionable norm until supplanted by the geometric bob cut at the end of the decade and the looser shag or feathered styles of the early 1970s.

Middle-aged women who dressed conservatively clung to the style a little longer, while their teenaged daughters, imitating the look of popular folk-rock singers such as Joan Baez, Mary Travers, and Cher, began abandoning bouffants in favor of long, straight "ironed hair" as early as 1965.[5]

My favorite cinematic bouffant, the one seen at the end of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg", worn for a wistful scene.

She spent the early parts of the movie with her hair simply styled, worn innocently long or in a girlish ponytail, the bouffant signaled tat her character had completely changed. She'd gone from a lovely innocent girl, to a lovely, ultra-sophisticated woman.

We're all making fun of the 60s bouffants here, but I have to say when it was done right it was done right AF.

That 60s glam look, when it was done the right way, was done like no other.

Here is a pic we're all familiar with - Valley of the Dolls - 60s glam on point - the bouffants and blowouts done the right way.

My next post will be Candice Bergen, another 60s doll doing it the right way.

IJN

Candice Bergen. 1966. PLEASE.

Princess Lee, 1962

That's not a bouffant, r122...it's a flip.

These were hairdos inspired by the Jell-O molds.

F124, the "flip" hairdos of the 1960s were still semi-bouffants, the hair on the top of the head was tangled up with back-combing to give it volume, and the whole thing was sprayed so stiff a hurricane couldn't budge it. God, I can't imagine what the fashionable women of the sixties went through, they couldn't leave the house without three hours of curling, straightening, back-combing, and piling on wiglets!

No wonder their daughters rebelled and let it all hang out.

A bouffant requires a plastic rain bonnet lest it all collapse in a shower.

[quote]A bouffant requires a plastic rain bonnet lest it all collapse in a shower.

So true.

The bouffant caused the hole in the ozone layer.

[quote]A bouffant requires a plastic rain bonnet lest it all collapse in a shower.

Or a mink hat should snow fall symbolically on your tour through China!

*

Amateurs.

Bouffants weren't obligatory in the mid-late 1960s, even if we tend to think they were. Here's Vanessa Redgrave in "Blow Up" (1966), playing an ordinary Londoner, and her hairstyle could be worn today.

I was a kid then, and don't remember the social ins and outs of bouffants vs. non-bouffants at the time. Were bouffants obligatory for the sophisticated, fashionable, or wealthy? Was a low-maintenance hairstyle like Vanessa's the mark of a hippie or a frump?

"Blow-up" was set in the mod subculture of Swinging London in the mid-60s. If you were still wearing your hair in the bouffant style, then you were hopelessly square.

Mod girls were wearing their hair flatter, longer, and with fringe (bangs).

'65

R133, she looks like a hair DON'T!

[quote] If you were still wearing your hair in the bouffant style, then you were hopelessly square.

They looked like hairhoppers to me!

'63

R133, that's a somewhat frumpy hairstyle, the way that it is all one length at the bottom and curled inwards like a bob. The top looks like a little bit of a mess in comparison to the rest of the hair. The top does have some potential for greatness, though. The top doesn't match with the sides and bottom. I'd say it's mullet-esque.

R122, that is not a bouffant. Yes, the roots are probably back-combed to give some volume on top, but that hair is smooth, in general (with the flip, of course). Also, parting hair on the side gives you some volume on top.

Candy

Hey does anyone remember in the 70s in San Francisco -around Union Square- a woman frequently seen with a platinum flip hairdo, shoulder length, which never moved no matter how windy it was - ? Always in a dress, looked like a Stepford wife...

We called her 'Helmet Head' & I'm not referring to either of 'The Twins.'

Is this ANOTHER thread about me? Oh you guys are just embarrassing me!

R141, I remember the twins, but not Helmet Head.

I feel this is Bergen’s biggest and best bouffant.

She looks like she's gonna shoot straight up in the air, r144.

Candi

Question for those who know more about historic hair styles -- is the style that Bergen is sporting in r146 & 147 properly called a bouffant? Yes, they are back-combed / teased for volume, but they seem, like the Flip - shown above to be a fundamentally different style and warrant a more unique name.

Despite the volume those styles seem to be more youthful and simply different than a classic bouffant, which is more "contained" for lack of a better work -- bouffant hair forms a more spherical unit, like Margaret Thatcher's and doesn't have the long length counter balancing the height at the crown.

Yes you are correct that no, it is not a bouffant—unless you are using a much broader term of art intended to mean anything teased up.

You wouldn’t have considered Priscilla Presley’s dreadful do to be bouffant?

^ that’s a bouffant!

It's a...dirigible.

I think that as the Beehive is the trash, tastelessly exaggerated lower-class version of a “respectable”Bouffant, what Priscilla has in R149 is the trashy exaggerated version of the Flip, or whatever the contemporary name was for the fashionable Candice Bergen and Catherine Deneuve styles posted above.

In every era there are always those who dial the prevailing trends up to 11 in vulgar, Kardashian overdo.

*

But you have to admit R152 they are fun.

OP, the higher the hair, the closer to God:

"Why was it so popular on older women?" Most of the time, when someone is popular with old people, it's popular because it was when they were young and they associate it with being young.

R154 - I grew up on Staten Island in the 70s - I’m well aware of how fun trashy can be!

R55- Those women make me glad I'm NOT heterosexual.

I loved Priscilla Presley's big hair and heavy eye make-up look.

I think Amy Winehouse was going for that look.

Amy was going for Ronnie Spector / The Ronettes look.

Priscilla's hair had the outline of a tunnel or a large haystack. There was no interesting shape to it. I guess the interest was in the sheer volume of the hair. She also had her eyeliner done in a cute and interesting way.

Oh.

I stand corrected, r160

It's a piece of cake.

Wrong thread.

Are you sure, r164?

The Lesbouffant

I think Anne-Marie of Denmark/Greece had the nicest bouffant of that era. She usually had an almost Princess Leia bun on each side.

Most of these look ridiculous. R167 is laughable.

What about the Belgians’ late Queen Fabiola?

Queen Fab

Greek my ass…