The Manual 2.0 
Hooray for Big Hair!
From Farrah to Ann, Texas women have combed, curled, teased, and tousled their way into the national consciousness. Who says bigger isn’t better?
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Now, I know that fashion historians claim Big Hair’s glory days occurred in eighteenth-century France, when coifs were three feet tall, Madame de Pompadour was a European celebrity, and Marie Antoinette was said to have a headdress so high she couldn’t get into her carriage. But all that was only for show, height for art’s sake. What makes the Texas Big Hair phenomenon even more amazing is that it holds fast against trendiness. I have listened to people criticize a lot of things—politics, the salaries of sports stars, abstract art—but there is nothing like a woman without Big Hair complaining about a woman with Big Hair (“Ugh, beauty pageant hair!” “Soap opera hair!”). Indeed, those oh-so-progressive haut monde women—the kind who search for the meaning of life in fashion magazines—look at BHWs (Big-Haired Women) with a horror once reserved for the likes of Lee Harvey Oswald. Today Big Hair is equivalent to a bimbo badge. BHWs are regarded as social outcasts, women who overtly exaggerate their femininity and create spiderwebs out of their hair just to ensnare men. “Big Hair is all about abundance and sexuality,” says Julie Logan, Glamour’s West Coast editor. “It all gets down to sex, to what women think that men want.”
Oh, give me a break. There’s a lot of dyed-and-fried Big Hair that a man would not dare touch for fear of getting some permanent chemical stain on his hands. There’s lacquered “helmet hair” that a man could not touch even if he wanted to—hockey pucks couldn’t get through that stuff. Furthermore, after spending an afternoon at the salon, a BHW usually is not fond of the idea of some passion-stricken guy suddenly showing up to run his hands through his hair.
I am sure many women spend hours setting, perming, and waving their hair because it makes them feel attractive. For that we have the right to say they lead silly, empty lives? Good Lord, the one Texas woman who has advanced the cause of feminism in America, Sarah Weddington, the heroine of Roe v. Wade, has one of the puffiest crops of Big Hair I’ve ever seen. With the right stylist, she could probably make her hair swell to the size of an oil storage tank.
The way I see it, women who load up their heads with hair are also loading themselves up with a kind of prestige. They’re not doing it to reassure men that they will always be girlish and nonthreatening. They are doing it to stand out. They refuse to be ignored. They will not give in to someone else’s idea of what is the fashionable style of the day. They are a proud, indomitable species. Isn’t it amusing that politically liberal women—they very ones you can usually count on to deride Big Hair—now find themselves clinging to Ann Richards’ old-fashioned Big Hair as a symbol of her solidity and strength? “Big Hair defies gravity,” says Gail Huitt, Richards’ hairdresser—and if big-haired women can defy gravity, she says, “there’s no telling what they can accomplish.”
Lamentably, in the past few years there have been major inroads made against Texas Big Hair. The economy, for one, has taken its toll. “In good-money times,” says Neinast, “you’re going to have a lot more parties, which naturally creates Big Hair. During a recession, women’s hair shrinks.” Moreover, a lot more Texas women have obviously been reading New York fashion magazines and opting for a different look. Despite Vidal Sassoon’s past failure, the relentlessly vogue English salon Toni and Guy came to Texas in 1985 and has expanded to ten locations in Dallas and Houston.
Yet just when we traditionalists think all might be lost, here come the major European and New York fashion designers, putting falls and wiglets and hair extensions on the models in their most recent runway shows. Some supermodels, such as Linda Evangelista, have even decided to start growing their hair out again. “We’ve now got teenage girls asking us to back-comb and back-brush their hair,” says Perry Henderson. “They want the French-twist look. They want us to use huge Velcro rollers in their hair.” Of course, top stylists aren’t calling this new look Big Hair, for fear of looking out-of-date. “We call it hair with volume,” sniffs Paul Joseph, the executive vice president of Toni and Guy.
The fact is, we will never be able to get away from Big Hair. As you can see from the photos in these pages, Big Hair has woven its way into our heritage; it has been passed down from generation to generation. Some of these women have worn their hair the same way for more than a quarter of a century. After all this time, their Big Hair remains a feast for the imagination.
Recently, I went to a campy Big Hair contest at the Red Lion Hotel in Austin, in which hairstylists from around the city had two hours to create the biggest, most astonishing hair possible. A few old-school Big Hair veterans were there, ratting and crimping and barrel-curling their models’ hair, but in one corner was a young stylist named Charon Bolin, wearing her own hair in a tightly clipped Twiggy-like fashion. “I’ve never, ever worn my hair big,” she told me firmly. “I’ve never even done a big-haired style before on a client.” She pursed her lips and blew on her model’s hair to dry the half can of hair spray she had just applied. “I don’t even know what I’m doing,” she murmured.
But as the evening passed, Bolin became more excited. Her model’s hair grew and grew. For a while, it resembled a martini glass, then a large fish. Finally, after using enough hair spray to wipe out a city the size of Amarillo, Bolin was finished. Her model looked like, well, a frizzed-out mermaid on acid.
Like Michelangelo stepping back to survey what he had done to the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, Bolin stared at her massive work of art. A satisfied smile crossed her face. She sighed. “Well, I now know one thing,” she finally said. “The bigger your hair, the closer you are to God.”
To that, I can only say, “Amen.”
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