The Mop-top!!!!!! | Page 2 | Fab Forum

I was working in the stacks upstairs and saw this book.

Of course I had to stop my work for a few minutes and see what the author had to say about The Beatles.

The wildly eccentric hairstyle of Liverpool's Beatles (see Chapter 14) appeared to be a runaway development of the Caesar cut.

In February 1964 there occurred a curious phenomenon which had some passing impact on the world of hair. The United States, after ample warning, was invaded by four young Englishmen who, in their way, caused nearly as much stir as the invading British nearly two hundred years earlier. They were, however, received with considerably more enthusiasm; and the near riots they caused were expressions of an adulation nobody could quite explain. The four, emanating from Liverpool, were known as the Beatles; and although they billed themselves as singers, whatever it was they did was more or less drowned out by the hysterical screams of their fans.

Their one claim to fame, however transient, lay, like Samson's, not so much in their talent (argggghhhhhhhhh - that was me, not the author) as in their hair. All four wore their hair in a modified fifteenth-century cut, completely obscuring their foreheads. Coming, as they did, at the height of a wig cycle, the result was, not surprisingly, a flurry of Beatle wigs. According to Time, the were being sold 'by the hundreds of dozens'. A manufacturer of novelties, appearing on television, claimed to have made and sold thousands of them. Established wig-makers in New York were getting frequent calls for them. Department stores featured them in window displays. And everybody talked about them.

That the wigs were sold seems certain. Who wore them is less clear. Certainly they were not in evidence on the streets of New York. Presumably they were bought by teen-agers and their indulgent parents, worn wherever teen-agers wear such things, and then, eventually, discarded along with other passing fancies. Perhaps, like the outmoded, eighteenth-century wigs, some of them were used for dustmops.

In England the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Pretty Things, and similar groups seemed to be having at least a passing effect on the hairdos of impressionable teen-age girls, whose consuming ambition in life, at least for the moment, was often merely to touch the hair of one of the singing idols. Sometimes they even tried to look as much like the boys as possible, and for a while it was not always easy to tell which was which. In September 1964 the New York Times Magazine ran six pictures of young, long-haired Britons with an indispensable caption indicating which were boys and which were girls.

That it was the girls who were emulating the boys and not the other way around is indicated by a Lancashire lad's reply to a question about his long hair: "My bird [girl friend] wears her hair short. I don't want to look like a girls, so I have my hair long.' Like Samson, the young Englishmen, in spite of the elegant dress of a group known as the Mods, considered their long hair a mark fo virility. It could also be of considerable assistance professionally. According to Anthony Carthew in the New York Times Magazine, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones put it this way: 'My own mother thought I was ridiculous at first. But I told her about all this money we're earning, and she saw the point.'