While a huge 96 per cent of housewives polled in 1962 described themselves as extremely or very happy, 90 per cent of the same sample hoped that their daughters would not lead the same life as they did. The daughters hoped they would not, either. By the late 1960s, with mass demonstrations and the spread of texts such as The Feminine Mystique, explicitly feminist women’s groups had been set up in most urban centres throughout America, furious at the government’s trivialisation of gender discrimination. They began to press for an opening-up of public debate on equal rights reform. Middle-class women were beginning to identify with the women’s movement. But their demands for equality were often ignored. At one national conference of the New Left in 1967, a women’s group won a place on the agenda with great difficulty. When their turn came, the chair refused to call on them and patted their representative, Shulamith Firestone, on the head, saying, ‘Move on little girl; we have more important issues to talk about here than women’s liberation.’114
In the early 1970s, the daughters of these women were entering their twenties, well-educated and facing life choices that were likely to involve some degree of sex discrimination. One of them was lion Specht, a college dropout from California who was working as a copywriter on Madison Avenue. She was a young woman working in a business dominated by older men. Every time she wrote a line of copy that included the word ‘woman’, a man would cross it out and write ‘girl’. In 1973 Specht joined a team working on a commercial for L’Oréal which was trying to win a share of the American hair-dye market from Clairol. They were having trouble getting the right image for a new blonde dye named ‘Preference’. Interviewed by Malcolm Gladwell, she explained how their particular problem reflected precisely the wider social problems of the era. ‘They had this traditional view of women, and my feeling was that I’m not writing an ad about looking good for men, which is what it seems to me that they were doing. I just thought, Fuck you. I sat down and did it, in five minutes. It was very personal. I can recite to you the whole commercial, because I was so angry when I wrote it.’ She lowered her voice to recite the text: ‘I use the most expensive hair colour in the world. Preference, by L’Oréal. It’s not that I care about money. It’s that I care about my hair. It’s not just the colour. I expect great colour. What’s worth more to me is the way my hair feels. Smooth and silky but with body. It feels good against my neck. Actually, I don’t mind spending more for L’Oréal. Because I’m’ – and here Specht struck her chest with her fist – ‘worth it.’
The commercial was a potent and uncompromising readjustment of Clairol’s message, switching the emphasis from that of a dependent woman looking good for the benefit of men to one of a sassy, independent woman looking good for the benefit of herself. Such a barefaced equation of hair colour with self-esteem had never been aired before. But L’Oréal had, in one short phrase, captured the particular feminist sensibilities of the day, just as Shirley Polykoff had done twenty years earlier. Preference sailed off the shelves and immediately began challenging Clairol’s dominance of the market. The advertisement was so successful that some years later L’Oréal took the phrase and made it the slogan for the whole company. Dozens of blondes have been auditioned over the years to say the line and been rejected. ‘There was one casting we did with Brigitte Bardot,’ recalled Ira Madris, a campaign copywriter from the period, ‘and Brigitte, being who she is, had the damnedest time saying that line. There was something inside her that didn’t believe it.’ Brigitte’s ‘Because I’m worth it’ had no conviction. She was a cuddly doll-blonde of the old school who dyed her hair for men, not for herself.115
Hair dye had become a strange symbol of women’s liberation. Young women were dyeing their hair for themselves, unperturbed by what men might think of it. And those men still living among the outdated sexist ideas of automatic male dominance were clinging to the blonde bimbo. Concerted efforts were being made to maintain the dumb blonde and she was increasingly represented by the blonde joke. Why do blondes have TGIF on their shoes? Toes Go In First. What do you call a blonde with two brain cells? Pregnant. Dumb blonde jokes began pouring out of pubs and clubs in the 1970s, joining the streams of Irish jokes that had been around for years.
As late as 1977, the Listener magazine published an article entitled ‘The irresistible dumb blonde’. ‘This is a creature’, wrote Charles Marowitz, ‘who makes no pretence at being well-read or intellectually genned-up. She does not enter into sophisticated word play. She has no concepts to juggle; no theories to espouse. Her most salient points are physical, and imbued with a kind of irresistible sexuality . . . she protrudes in the right places. Her flesh invites animal approaches. Her aura suggests she has been anatomically constituted for the exercise of pleasure. Her small-talk, her trivia, even her drivel are, in a way necessary attributes, and actually enhance her other attractions.’
To keep the dumb blonde alive, dozens of blonde sex symbols were still being engineered by the moguls of Hollywood and the new tycoons of television. In 1977, Farrah Fawcett, a toothsome blonde with a body toned and tanned to perfection, appeared in the leeringly sexist series Charlie’s Angels. At a stroke she created The All-American Look for the next ten years. Her long Californian sun-streaked hair was layered and fluffed until it looked ‘wild, free and natural’, and it became the basis of international myths of eroticism, success and adventure. Eight million people bought copies of the poster in which Farrah posed, bursting pleasingly out of an unzipped wetsuit. Her sexuality was clean and unthreatening and just about powerful enough to make a thirteen-year-old boy try out his first ogle. ‘I think she’s the worst actress in the world,’ said one New York fan, ‘but I love her hair.’ It was a judgement shared by many. Farrah’s wild and free hair captured the essence of California, its cult of the golden body-beautiful, and its obsession with health, vigour and the sexual appeal of total fitness. Farrah became an icon of her times, the embodiment of the American fantasy of success and beauty.
In Britain, by the time women fans of Charlie’s Angels had begun teetering through damp suburban streets displaying their doomed imitations of Farrah Fawcett’s hair, the look was already under attack. A new young generation was gathering in a tribal cavalcade of disaffected adolescents, drawn by the romance of anarchy and infamy. Brought up in the relentlessly grey economic recession of the ’70s, many of them were unemployed, depressed and poorly educated working-class teenagers, and they celebrated their self-imposed exile from society with flamboyant sartorial obscenities.
The cult of punk had taken root in the mid-1970s in a small but sensational shop in London’s King’s Road called SEX. Its name was brazenly spelt out in huge letters of padded pink vinyl, displayed like a vast spongy pop-art sculpture above its front window. It looked terrifying. Beckoning the customer inside were piles of naked headless mannequins draped over each other as if indulging in an orgy. Those brave enough to enter found themselves in a kind of fetish gymnasium, the walls lined with pale pink rubber, and bars hung with whips, handcuffs and other exotica glorifying the sordid, the inappropriate and the tasteless. Presiding over this provocative little emporium were two ruling blondes, the two icons of the punk movement, Jordan and Vivienne Westwood.
Jordan was the daughter of blameless working-class parents from Seaford, a sleepy Sussex seaside town whose genteel and largely retired population pottered along in ignorance of the vitriol boiling up in the King’s Road. Jordan was not like them. Every morning she joined soberly suited commuters on the train ride into London, dressed typically in stilettos and ripped black fishnet stockings held up by suspenders. Her black vinyl leotard was accessorised with a harness of chains. Her hair was peroxided to a violent shade of platinum blonde and teased into a rigidly lacquered beehive. To give extra zest to her public project of épater les bourgeois, she carefully ringed her eyes every morning with lavish quantities of kohl, and painted her lips in a macabre black or dark purple. ‘If you want the epitome of imposing and intimidating,’ she recalled, ‘that’s
what I was. You had to have courage to walk into that shop.’ Standing beside a double bed covered with a rubber sheet, clad in her shop gear – a studded leather bra and thigh-high boots – Jordan goaded her customers to clamber into skin-tight rubber suits and leather harnesses. Frequently asked to model the clothes herself, she became a billboard for SEX and later, as the punk star of Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee, 2. recognised emblem of the punk movement.116
Vivienne Westwood was her boss, the proprietor with Malcolm McLaren of the shop, and designer of a range of customised clothes which later formed the core wardrobe of the Sex Pistols. Posing like Jordan as the intimidating dominatrix, Westwood wore kinky leather fetish gear and spike heels and modelled her own slashed and safety-pinned T-shirts nonchalantly emblazoned with the most provocative images she could think of. The severed head of the queen, swastikas and male genitals were her basics. To ensure a maximum shock aesthetic, she aggressively peroxided her hair and razored it into spikes, gelling it to stand erect in a style which David Bowie later adopted.
The bottle-blonde look was deliberately repulsive. It was designed to look subversively artificial, chemically enhanced with visible dark roots, a vicious reaction against the dazzlingly healthy, natural and girlishly compliant look of Californian beauty. Quickly associated with all that was cheap and tasteless, it had gained an additional evil slur from the notorious photographs flashed around the world a fewr years earlier first of Ruth Ellis and then of Myra Hindley, their bottle-blonde hair parted to reveal slashes of slovenly dark roots.
In the context of the mid-1970s, when sexuality was not something that was openly discussed, even less flaunted, the impact of SEX and its two blonde punks was deeply and perversely shocking. Westwood had always had an itch for revolt and her ideas were eagerly embraced by anguished or bored adolescents. Soon suburban teenage girls were spotted parading down the King’s Road in peroxided hair, heavy black make-up and T-shirts featuring Snow White surrounded by seven sexually aroused dwarfs. Chrissie Hynde remembers noticing boys in other parts of London in black leather jackets and bleached blond hair. Parents, teachers and elders were satisfactorily outraged. When Debbie Harry began conquering the world’s rock charts in the late 1970s with her high-adrenalin band Blondie, sporting peroxided blonde hair with a strip of anarchic dark roots down the middle, the look became the height of alternative chic and the emblem of female rebellion.
Ten years later, Vivienne Westwood, the renegade eldest daughter of a cosy, ballroom-dancing, working-class provincial couple who once ran the Tintwistle Post Office in Derbyshire, posed on the cover of Tatler as Margaret Thatcher. Beneath the image read the banner headline ‘This Woman Used to Be a Punk’. It was a convincing and highly subversive likeness. Michael Roberts, the photographer and stylist, remembers that Vivienne did not initially want to be part of the spoof because she hated Margaret Thatcher. But, once convinced of its shock appeal, ‘she did it so well it was creepy’. Dressed in a conservative suit, pearls and a bouffant blonde wig, she imagined herself leaning over a child in a hospital bed and telling herself, ‘I care, I really care.’
History does not relate what Margaret Thatcher made of the April fool cover of Tatler that year. While Westwood had decisively dunked her dark hair in the peroxide in the early ’70s, pulling out a head dripping with rebellious vitriol, Mrs Thatcher’s change from mousy to power-blonde was a more gradual mutation. It also coincided with a broader social change. Ever since the war, the typical uniform of the quintessential Tory woman had been a muted twin-set and pearls with sensible shoes. But by the early 1980s, things were changing. Colour schemes became vibrant. Blonde highlights began to appear in hairstyles. Heels got higher and pads sprouted in the shoulders of executive suits. More women were in employment, some of them in executive roles, and they were confidently creating their own look. Far from the days of Monroe’s dependency on male approval, these power-blondes were doing things just as they wished. Any man foolish enough to call them dumb would have been laughed at.
Mrs Thatcher was one of the most powerful of power-blondes. An early unsuccessful job application at ICI had produced a personnel report saying, ‘this woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated’. As a young MP she was much the same, but hid it better. Nevertheless, no one told her what to do, still less how she should do her hair.
The hairstyle took a while to evolve. As Mrs Thatcher climbed up the ranks of the Conservative Party, her hair gradually became more regimented. When still a new MP in the early 1960s her dark hair had been softly brushed back and allowed to curl freely. As a minister it had been dyed a violent blonde and backcombed to give her a rigidly lacquered helmet. By the time she was leader of the opposition in 1975 it was being inflated further into a formidable sphere, every hair smoothed into submission. And by 1979, when she walked into Downing Street, her hair was styled into a huge imperial halo, golden and utterly uncompromising, a demonstration of self-assurance, conviction and power. The shampoo-and-set look was resolutely anti-fashion; like the queen’s shampoo and set, it was a way of signalling the unassailability, longevity and immutability of her reign.
Mrs Thatcher’s long-term regular haircolourist, Brian Carter, says that blonde hair softens the features and helps women to fight the effects of advancing age. He was engaged in 1979 to tone down Mrs Thatcher’s violent platinum colour and to give her look more authority and dignity. But there were other reasons for Mrs Thatcher’s mutation from mousy to blonde. Just as Queen Elizabeth I and many other powerful women had used both the beacon-like effects and the sexual attractions of blonde hair to their advantage, Mrs Thatcher realised that her golden halo gave her advantages. It harnessed the light. It demanded attention. It demonstrated her status and wealth. It was the perfect model for the nation. As Grant McCracken notes in his hilarious anthropological study, Big Hair, Mrs Thatcher’s hair ‘was profuse and celebrated the abundance of Tory policy promised in 1980s England. (Ronald Reagan’s profuse hair had this same significance for 1980s America.) And it was coherent, the very picture of a nation bending itself to a single will.’
Mrs Thatcher obviously had not read, or had chosen to ignore, the words of John Molloy, a ‘dressing engineer’ whose 1980 book, Women: Dress For Success, was designed to help the newly emerging executive woman to create the right look around the male-dominated boardroom table. Women were advised to look ‘serious’ for work; that is, not too feminine. Long hair was to be avoided as too feminine and too sexy, while curly or wavy hair lacked authority. As for dyed blonde hair, that was an absolute no-no. ‘While blondes may or may not have more fun, brunettes definitely have more authority. Dark hair means power and blonde hair means popularity, so any attractive small blonde reading this book may want to decide whether she would rather have more fun or more power.’ Throughout the 1980s Mrs Thatcher enjoyed a great deal of power and a certain amount of fun. With her thrusting embonpoint, her basilisk stare, her large handbag and that uncompromising blonde helmet, she had no trouble keeping her rowdy cabinet and the rowdier opposition benches firmly under control, and whenever she went abroad she was trailed by a wake of admiring foreign statesmen.
During Mrs Thatcher’s reign, other assertive women restyled their mousy selves as blondes, untroubled by charges of dumbness, and climbed the ladders of their professions or simply rose to greater power and influence. Hillary Clinton was one. Like Mrs Thatcher, she had spent her early political life in dull brown obscurity; but by the time of the 1992 presidential election she had radically restyled her image. She started wearing make-up. She ditched her glasses in favour of contact lenses. She had her hair cut more flatteringly and she began to use blonde highlights. By the time the Clintons were established in the White House, she was a fully fledged blonde. Over the years the style has changed, but the colour has not. Hillary is blonde for the same reason that Thatcher is blonde: it makes her look younger, it demands more attention, it is sexually attractive and it signals status and control. Never was a h
air colour used to greater advantage than when Hillary appeared on the cover of Vogue, blonde, cool and controlled, at precisely the moment when the public was being fed images of the tousled and curly-black-haired Monica Lewinsky. It was not so much a good-bad dichotomy as a contrast between a self-disciplined woman and her husband, a man out of control.
For the same reasons of youth, beauty, status and power, other prominent women have performed similar mutations from brunette to golden blonde – Tina Brown, Jennifer Saunders, Kiri Te Kanawa, Camilla Parker Bowles and many more. The very blonde Denise Kingsmill, a powerful employment lawyer and author on behalf of the government of the Kingsmill Review on Women’s Employment and Pay, visits her hair colourist to have her roots dyed twice a week. Nobody would call her dumb.
Fifty years after Marilyn Monroe burst panting on to the screens of cinemas all over the world, do ‘blonde’ and ‘bimbo’ still necessarily go together? The answer is it depends what sort of blonde. The crisply cut, carefully tailored executive blonde does not trigger thoughts of dumbness. Quite the opposite. Her hair signals calculating control. But the long-haired or bouffant blonde who also displays enhanced lips and bosoms, wide eyes and skimpy clothes is still likely to attract the bimbo label. Pamela Anderson, Claudia Schiffer, Caprice, Dolly Parton and Ivana Trump are all examples of the type and all seem to bear an alarming resemblance to blow-up dolls. They are fashioned to appeal to men. They may have the highest Is in the world, but the way they look is a mark of submission.
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