I have short hair. I’ve always had more-or-less short hair – the longest I’ve ever been able to grow it was just past my shoulders. I used to try to keep it as long as I could for playing vintage dress-up, but on a daily basis it wasn’t cute. My hair is fine, and thin, and really just wants to be short. (On the plus side, it takes a heat curl really well, so I can work some magic with a curling iron.)

The thing is, until recently I also had a wig/fake hair phobia. Things like fake hair and fake nails just really grossed me out and I wanted nothing to do with them. Which is a challenge when you want to participate in historical costuming, because not only does fake hair make it easier when you don’t have much of your own, but it’s also much easier to plop a pre-styled wig on your head than spend hours leading up to an event trying to do an elaborate, archaic hairdo on yourself.

I think (hope!) that I’ve gotten over my fear of fake hair, but I’ve also been having fun this past year experimenting with short historical hairstyles. I plan to do full outfit posts about all these costumes in the near future, but I thought it would be fun to look at just the hairstyles together. Apologies for the poor quality of many of the images – I don’t usually think my hair is anything special so I usually skip close-ups, so most of these photos are cropped down from full length images.

For Friday night at Costume College, I dressed in a French Empire style called a la victime, which was fashioned after the chopped-off hair that the aristocracy had to endure before going under the guillotine. The image on the left was my inspiration (I can’t find the original image source – if you can direct me to it, please let me know!). The center image is the excellent trial that my hairdresser did for me (the great/terrible thing about short hair is that you get to visit your hairdresser often, and mine has been helping me with some of these unusual styles). On the right is my final version from Costume College, which is probably too coiffed and attractive, and I realize that my hair is technically too LONG for this style! I don’t get to say that often.

This set of images is from a couple different nights at Camp Hollywood. Left and center are from “Cabaret Night”, so in a nod to Weimar Berlin I wore a man’s suit and fingerwaved my hair. The photo on the right is from the very next night, when my husband and I participated in a swing dance tribute performance for the 90th anniversary of the Venice Beach Clip. No way am I ever gonna have hair as long and thick as Genevieve Grazis, and no way am I ready for dancing with fake hair, but I can still do some good curl fluff and wear a big bow for the right effect. As a non-hair-person who has had to become somewhat adept with her hair, it blows my mind to look at this set of photos and see that the exact same haircut can produce such different looks.

Irene and Vernon Castle image source from The Whirl of Life (1915).

This final short hair look was what I wore to the Great War Gallop. This style was loosely inspired by Irene Castle, who led the bob trend by chopping off her hair in all the way back in 1914! Again, for this style, I just used a curling iron all over and sculpted my “curl fluff” into an appropriate shape/silhouette for the period.

Do you have short hair? How do you handle it when playing historical dress-up? Are there other short hair icons I should attempt to emulate?