Revisiting the 1960's and Hairstyles from my Youth

          I recently bought granddaughter Amalia a sticker book from the Usborne Series about 1960's fashion history, and became fascinated reading it.  I realized that I am a living fossil who experienced every fashion fad of that decade--especially in the two years ('68 and '69) when I was living in London and met Mary Quant. And I own a mini-dress that was worn by Twiggy in a fashion shoot--although I gave it to daughter Eleni, since I am no longer the size of Twiggy.

          The sticker book inspired me to re-post this essay from nine years ago about my peculiar hairstyles of the period.  I just wish I had as much hair now as I did then, and I don't go to the hairdresser twice a week any more--just once.  I may even re-post a related photo essay about my memories of real-life sixties fashions.

Horrible Hairdos from my Youth

Last Thursday in The New York Times Style section, a page of photographs showed the six steps to achieving a retro ‘60’s beehive hairdo. According to a hairstylist at Bumble and Bumble “The key to make this look modern and not too retro is haphazardness.” He had prepared the models at Vera Wang’s fall show with “slightly messy” beehives with tousled locks at the nape of the neck. According to The Times, “Amy Winehouse offsets hers with tattooed arms.”

Ever since “Mad Men” ushered in a widespread nostalgia for the naughty 1960’s I have been bemused as young people who were not born then celebrate that era of sin, pointed bras and three-martini business lunches.

One of the few skill sets I have down pat is how to make a beehive hairdo. The sight of the “retro beehive” whisked me down Memory Lane, recalling the sight of myself and half a dozen freshman girls lined up at the mirrored wall in the dorm bathroom, carefully teasing our long hair until it stood straight up. Lots of hair spray was involved. My daughters think that I was solely responsible for the hole in the ozone layer due to my lavish use of hair spray.

No tousled retro ironic beehives for us. Ours were as smooth and as stiff as a football helmet—hence all the urban legends about girls who never took down their beehives and ultimately learned that mice or something worse had nested within.

After teasing the hair into a state suggesting the Bride of Frankenstein, I would carefully fold it into a high French twist, securing it with a handful of hairpins and then, after using an afro pick to achieve maximum bouffant-ness, spray some more.

In my youth, a hairdo would come into fashion and we all would immediately have to have it, whether it was flattering or not. The first one I remember was the duck tail (also called D.A. for “Duck’s Ass”), the signature of “greasers” and their leather- jacketed girlfriends in the 1950’s. It took a long time for me to talk my parents into letting me have one—I was about 13 at the time—and even longer to convince them to let me add the peroxide streak that was de rigueur to go with it. I’m just sorry I don’t have a photo to show you how truly awful it looked.

Even more unforgiving was the pixie cut which I am told is now enjoying a renaissance on celebrities like Victoria Beckham. Less glamorous people, like me, ended up looking like someone who was just past chemo, or like those French women who fraternized with the Germans and were punished by having their hair cut off. I vaguely remember Jean Seberg as bringing the pixie cut into fashion. The unfortunate photo of me here in my pixie cut dates from 1958 when I was a junior in high school. 

Then I went to college in Wisconsin and mastered the non-ironic beehive. Two years later, in 1961 I transferred to U Cal Berkeley where I first encountered full-out ethnic Afros and white men with Jesus hair and beards. In graduate school in Manhattan, I remember other girls (not me) ironing their long blonde hair on an ironing board to straighten it and also setting it at night on empty orange-juice-concentrate cans.

After getting a Master’s from Columbia in 1964, I got a job in New York women’s magazines and hung around with editorial assistants who were dating those Mad Men types and drank martinis at lunch. I usually ate lunch at my desk.

Soon the Beatles came to the U.S. and Vidal Sassoon cut Twiggie’s hair into an asymmetrical bob and we all had to have some version of it. You can see my would-be Sassoon cut below. I wish I still had that mini-dress and that brooch. The photo is dated Feb. 1967.

Several haircuts have become all the rage since then—think Farrah Faucett’s feather cut and Jennifer Anniston’s whatever it was. And Kate Gosselin revisiting Sassoon. But I got married and had children and never had time any more to become a haircut fashion victim.

Now my hair has become so thin that I couldn’t possibly tease it into a beehive, ironic or not. Twice a week, first thing in the morning, I go to my hairdresser Roy Hurwitz of London Lass, because I am incapable of doing anything with my own hair. He trained under Vidal Sassoon.

Did you know that Joan Collins always wears a wig because her hair is so thin? I’m told she has 200 wigs. So does Lady Gaga, I think. Maybe wigs will become the next Big Thing.

Voting for Celebrities and Their Eye Glasses

Three years ago I wrote a post about my ill-fated attempt to copy Sarah Palin’s eyewear.  While I wasn’t a fan of her political views, I sure did like her rimless glasses.  My eye doctor had given me a new prescription.  He said I had the beginning of cataracts and needed prisms in the lenses and some sort of special film on them to improve my increasingly poor night-driving vision.

When I went to the optician and said, with some embarrassment, that I wanted glasses like Palin’s, he remained calm, although he later told me that opticians all over the country were then frantically contacting each other to track down that very thing.  He said that Sarah had provided a terrific boon for Kawasaki (“like the motorcycles”), the Japanese company that produces her eyewear. 

When he added up all the special stuff I needed, those glasses came to $465.  Ouch!  I soon posted the sad saga of how I took my glasses to an art class at night, got out in the middle of a blizzard and lost them. After searching in the parking lot for an hour I drove home with one eye shut and returned the next morning to find my chic new glasses had been crushed by a snow plow.

 Now once again a political woman and her glasses are making news.  Hillary Clinton is wearing dark-rimmed glasses, and we are told this is the result of the concussion and blood clot she suffered recently.  Like me, she has to have expensive prisms in her lenses to prevent her from seeing double. Many say the glasses give her increased gravitas and a more imposing air, but I feel her pain at having to give up her contacts.  We all know that men seldom make passes at  girls who wear glasses.

I empathize with Hillary’s plight.  With one very near-sighted eye and the other very far-sighted, the only way I can avoid seeing double is with ultra thick lenses, and even then I do a lot of praying while driving at night, because the glare of oncoming cars wipes out my vision of the road.  (I was born with a lazy eye and had to go to kindergarten wearing John-Lennon style granny glasses over an eye patch on my left eye!)

 Some celebrities, like Tina Fey and Meryl Streep, look good in their conservative. sexy-librarian glasses.  Other celebrities, like Elton John and Lady Gaga, choose to bite the bullet and flaunt the most outrageous specs they can find.  In fact, I believe Lady Gaga has designed a whole line of eyewear-- but I don’t think either Hillary or I will be wearing her creations any time soon.

 Last month I went back to my optician—the one who had suffered through the Palin glasses mania—with a brand new prescription for dark glasses, stronger than before, to correct my double vision while driving in the daytime.  I told him I was thinking of switching political parties and going for something sort of Jackie Kennedy.  (Back in the sixties, both Jackie and I lived in New York and bought our over-sized dark glasses from Meyrowitz.)

 He knew just was I meant. The price was painful, but the glasses were ready in time for our trip to Nicaragua, and I happily wore them everywhere, even in the pool.  (As you can see, it was very windy which scared granddaughter Amalia, especially when the wind blew the lounge chairs into the pool.)

I went back to thank my optician for putting up with my vacillating between political parties when it comes to my style in specs.   But he didn’t listen.  He  was distracted, worrying if he had enough stock to deal with the expected rush on Tom Ford Marko Aviator glasses like those worn by Daniel Craig in the latest James Bond movie Skyfall.

Horrible Hairdos from my Youth

Last Thursday in The New York Times Style section a page of photographs showed the six steps to achieving a retro ‘60’s beehive hairdo. According to a hairstylist at Bumble and Bumble “The key to make this look modern and not too retro is haphazardness.” He had prepared the models at Vera Wang’s fall show with “slightly messy” beehives with tousled locks at the nape of the neck. According to The Times, “Amy Winehouse offsets hers with tattooed arms.”

Ever since “Mad Men” ushered in a widespread nostalgia for the naughty 1960’s I have been bemused as young people who were not born then celebrate that era of sin, pointed bras and three-martini business lunches.

One of the few skill sets I have down pat is how to make a beehive hairdo. The sight of the “retro beehive” whisked me down Memory Lane, recalling the sight of myself and half a dozen freshman girls lined up at the mirrored wall in the dorm bathroom, carefully teasing our long hair until it stood straight up. Lots of hair spray was involved. My daughters think that I was solely responsible for the hole in the ozone layer due to my lavish use of hair spray.

No tousled retro ironic beehives for us. Ours were as smooth and as stiff as a football helmet—hence all the urban legends about girls who never took down their beehives and ultimately learned that mice or something worse had nested within.

After teasing the hair into a state suggesting the Bride of Frankenstein, I would carefully fold it into a high French twist, securing it with a handful of hairpins and then, after using an afro pick to achieve maximum bouffant-ness, spray some more.

In my youth, a hairdo would come into fashion and we all would immediately have to have it, whether it was flattering or not. The first one I remember was the duck tail (also called D.A. for “Duck’s Ass”), the signature of “greasers” and their leather- jacketed girlfriends in the 1950’s. It took a long time for me to talk my parents into letting me have one—I was about 13 at the time—and even longer to convince them to let me add the peroxide streak that was de rigueur to go with it. I’m just sorry I don’t have a photo to show you how truly awful it looked.

Even more unforgiving was the pixie cut which I am told is now enjoying a renaissance on celebrities like Victoria Beckham. Less glamorous people, like me, ended up looking like someone who was just past chemo, or like those French women who fraternized with the Germans and were punished by having their hair cut off. I vaguely remember Jean Seberg as bringing the pixie cut into fashion. The unfortunate photo of me here in my pixie cut dates from 1958 when I was a junior in high school.


Then I went to college in Wisconsin and mastered the non-ironic beehive. Two years later, in 1961 I transferred to U Cal Berkeley where I first encountered full-out ethnic Afros and white men with Jesus hair and beards. In graduate school in Manhattan, I remember other girls (not me) ironing their long blonde hair on an ironing board to straighten it and also setting it at night on empty orange-juice-concentrate cans.

After getting a Master’s from Columbia in 1964, I got a job in New York women’s magazines and hung around with editorial assistants who were dating those Mad Men types and drank martinis at lunch. I usually ate lunch at my desk.

Soon the Beatles came to the U.S. and Vidal Sassoon cut Twiggie’s hair into an asymmetrical bob and we all had to have some version of it. You can see my would-be Sassoon cut below. I wish I still had that mini-dress and that brooch. The photo is dated Feb. 1967.


Several haircuts have become all the rage since then—think Farrah Faucett’s feather cut and Jennifer Anniston’s whatever it was. And Kate Gosselin revisiting Sassoon. But I got married and had children and never had time any more to become a haircut fashion victim.

Now my hair has become so thin that I couldn’t possibly tease it into a beehive, ironic or not. Twice a week, first thing in the morning, I go to my hairdresser Roy of London Lass, because I am incapable of doing anything with my own hair. He trained under Vidal Sassoon.

Did you know that Joan Collins always wears a wig because her hair is so thin? I’m told she has 200 wigs. So does Lady Gaga, I think. Maybe wigs will become the next Big Thing.