Historic hairstyles

I'm going quickly mention the fontage - the more modest hair style of the 1700's... just as a means of leading up to the Pouffe!

Towards the beginning of the century, women's styles were still worn relatively close to the head.  The average fontage was a mere 4-6" of hair, curled and piled on top of the head.  




In the 1750's, the Tête de Mouton was a popular style were curled were arranged in stacks or rolls along the sides and top of the head.  The hair was heavily powdered...  a mere 10 years later this simple look would climb to new heights and almost literally become a canvas for the wearer to express herself.






Léonard-Alexis Autié (Marie Antoinette's hairdresser) and Rose Bertin (Marie's dress maker) would be key in creating new and ostentatious styles...  



The Ques-à-Co style, which had three ostrich plumes pinned to the back of the head, curling forward in a question mark was a instant success.



The à la Comète style was inspired by the sighting of Haley's Comet, was described as having curly tendrils of hair woven into dozens of fiery colored ribbons.

Autié's Pouf Sentimental was perhaps the most extravagant styling of the period...  first worn by Madame the Duchess of Chartres.  It was comprised of over 14 yards of gauze, topped by feather and plumes.  In the hair was set two wax figurines - one of the little Duke le Beaujolais as a child in his nurse's arms and the other a young African boy whom the Duchess was fond.  Also included was plate of cherries, on which a parrot was perched, nibbling at the fruit.  The initials of the Duke of Chartres, Penthièvre and of Orléans were crafted from locks of each gentleman's hair and expertly pinned into this colossal tableau.  The look was so extreme, but it caught on - soon women were wearing their hair full of symbols of their life, love and emotions.  The height of these styles often made the face closer to the center of a woman's height and they would be festooned with butterflies, cupid figures, birds in cages and even decorative funeral urns.  The wives of officers would have regiments of soldier figurines in their pouf.



Portrait of Maria Amalie Auguste of Saxony in Polish costume - 1780 - by Heinrich Carl Brandt.



Miss Juniper Fox - 1777



The Zephyr, was like a portable garden of flowers, filling up the hair in a spectacular display of variety and color...


The coiffure à la Belle Poule featured a ship appearing as though it were sailing through waves of hair.  




There was seemingly no end to the extremes and variations of the pouf hair style...






Léonard Autié himself wrote about the styles he was fabricating:  "I myself had been frightened by the shamelessness of my conception; but soon the folly of the period got the better of me.  One saw in the poufs the strangest things that fancy could imagine."


These styles were typically created with the majority of the hair being that of the wearer - men were allowed to wear perukes / wigs, but a woman wearing a wig would have been seen as a strike against her womanhood.  Some hair pieces would have been used, but wearing a wig for a woman was typically shunned, unless she had thinning hair or some other reason why her hair could not be styled.  Depending on your budget, these hair pieces could have been made from human hair, yak, sheep or goat hair.

There are no mentions of recipes for soap for hair at the time, so it was likely that people were using common washing soap (basically the same as would have been used in laundering).  Pomades made from animal fats were used to shape and mold hair - the usual recipes calling for sheep and pig suet, augmented with rose water boiled apples (for tackiness?) and scented with various sweet smelling oils.  Powders were typically made from finely ground starch that was also scented with orange flower, lavender or orris - it also could be obtained in the more somber color choices of white, black or grey, but was also available in pink, blue or violet.

While there are many stories about mice living in women's pouffes, I think that this was probably more of an anecdotal tale - or an extreme incidence where a wing was left unattended for weeks and later rediscovered as a bed and breakfast for vermin.  The cost of keeping these styles would have meant that they were too prized to become a home for mice - and the high level of maintenance needed would have made it rather impossible anyway!

 

Portraiture of women in both England and France were overall quite similar during the 1700's, though English women were wearing somewhat simpler styles and refraining from the ubiquitous use of powder that was seen in France.  By the 1770's, the looks become remarkably similar, including the use of powder.