Gibson Girl
There is a look that almost every person interested in early twentieth-century fashion has seen at some point: a woman with wavy hair piled high on her head, her back straight, her gaze direct, her entire bearing suggesting someone who takes up exactly as much space as she wishes to.
The hair is a cool ash blonde: a distinctive, silvery shade. It is light and luminous, and the hairstyle itself is on a scale that sets it apart. This is a large and voluminous updo, a towering arrangement of deeply sculpted waves and curls that adds several centimeters of height to the wearer's silhouette.
The waves are enormous: full, deep S-curves that travel across the top of the head in horizontal rows, each wave broad enough to show off the full, glistening surface of the hair. At the sides, the waves give way to softer, rounder curls that cluster at the temples and ears before being swept into the updo. The entire construction has a baroque richness, a love of volume and texture that represents the full flowering of the Gibson Girl era before simpler styles began to take over.
Running across the front of this magnificent arrangement is a slim, pearl-encrusted headband. The pearls provide a gentle, elegant contrast to the dramatic hair around them. This is exactly the right ornament for this hairstyle: something refined that provides definition without competing with the hair itself.
From the profile, the scale of the updo becomes even clearer. The waves stack upward from the nape, building and building until they reach their full height at the crown. The neckline is clean and long, the cream lace collar of the blouse providing an impeccable base. And then from the back, you can see how cleverly the whole structure has been assembled, with the waves and curls supporting one another, pinned invisibly from within.
This is the kind of hairstyle that marks the end of an era: grand, technically demanding, and utterly beautiful. Within a few months, the world would change in ways that made such elaborate styling seem like a memory from another time.
©Hairfinder.com
See also: Vintage Hair