#bouffant wig

[bitter69uk]

“Later we [Culture Club] played with them a few times and they had the most unique, hypnotic sound. It’s trashy Americana, John Waters, Divine, the Shangri-La’s, high camp and bubblegum punk. The beat is everything. Fred always reminded me of Dr Zachary Smith from Lost in Space. I never thought about whether the B-52’s had a gay angle. They were just against rules in general – taking classic American kitsch and giving it a punk, space-age irreverence, like a beautiful car crash with pop surrealism. They were very camp but very funky: always on it, melodic but effortlessly free. It’s the sort of pop music that I want to hear.”

/ Boy George reflecting on the B-52’s in The Guardian /

Born on this day: happy 76th birthday to the sublime Kate Pierson (née Catherine Elizabeth Pierson, 27 April 1948) - singer, multi-instrumentalist, bouffant wig enthusiast and one of the founding members of Athens, Georgia’s essential post-punk party band the B-52’s! For me, Pierson’s spine-tingling dissonant science fiction anti-harmonies with co-vocalist Cindy Wilson are one of the defining sounds of American New Wave music. Pictured: Pierson captured by Lynn Goldsmith in the early 1980s.

[bitter69uk]

“Just when Jayne was in need of new hairstyles came the Great Wig Robbery of 1965. When the US banned human hair imports from Communist countries, wigs suddenly became worth their weight in gold. In February 1965 a band of well-organized crooks hit Wigtowne’s warehouse in Brooklyn. The thieves broke in through the skylight and then through a first-floor wall and made off with $60,000 worth of goods, including four extra-fancy “nude white” wigs (worth $1,200 apiece) set aside for Jayne, and seventeen wigs that customers had left to have restyled. On their way out, the gang also pilfered an astonishing $15,000 worth of false eyelashes. Wigtowne was not the only target in that year’s hair heists. That same week salesman Alfred Averell was arrested with $111,000 worth of hot wigs and hairpieces stolen from his employers, Sylvester & Sons. He was nabbed when his getaway driver left hair hanging out the back of the truck, and police thought it was a murder or kidnapping.”

Eve Golden reporting on Jayne Mansfield’s 1965 wig crisis in the essential 2021 biography Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn’t Help It.

[bitter69uk]

My boyfriend is watching an old episode of Columbo (“Lovely but Lethal” from 1973). I’m convinced that guest star Vera Miles is wearing one of Frederick’s of Hollywood’s deluxe imported human hair “glamour wigs.”

[bitter69uk]

Giggly bouffant-wigged 4’11” Cockney sex kitten. Gifted comedic actress. Fierce but vulnerable soap opera matriarch. Durable old-school British show biz royalty. Personification of East End “Pearly Queen” grit. Farewell to “Babs”, the much-loved Dame Barbara Windsor (née Barbara Ann Deeks, 6 August 1937 – 10 December 2020). I note with bemusement that none of her obituaries seem to mention Too Hot to Handle (1960), the lurid British-made sexploitation thriller starring Jayne Mansfield, in which young starlet Windsor played a stripper called Ponytail! (An image of Windsor in this role is used in the current Lobotomy Room flyer). Understandably, all the television tributes include a clip of Windsor as Eastenders’ Peggy Mitchell roaring, “Get out of my pub!” She also had an extremely idiosyncratic way of pronouncing the name Frank as “Fur-wank.”

[bitter69uk]

Happy 83rd birthday to beloved, undisputed First Lady of Rockabilly and Perennial Hair Hopper Role Model, the fabulous Miss Wanda Jackson (born 20 October 1937)!

[bitter69uk]

Early 1960s glamour shot of raunch queen Mae West - the bouffant years.

Let’s face it: the puritanical, hypocritical and homophobic hellsite Tumblr has become a dying platform since it banned adult content in December 2018. I post here less and less. Follow me instead on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or on my blog. Fuck Tumblr!

[bitter69uk]

KLAXON! My friend Kevin has alerted me that one of the late, great sex kitten-gone-berserk Jayne Mansfield’s signature blonde wiglets is up for auction! Apparently, THIS hairpiece was in her wigcase, retrieved from the trunk of the car involved in Mansfield’s fatal 1967 car crash. I love how the wiglet is displayed in these photos: ratty, uncombed, not displayed on a Styrofoam head to maximum advantage. Somehow, it’s true to the messy, wayward spirit of late-period Jayne this way! Full info here. 

Let’s face it: the puritanical, hypocritical and homophobic hellsite Tumblr has become a dying platform since it banned adult content in December 2018. I post here less and less. Follow me instead on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or on my blog. Fuck Tumblr!

[bitter69uk]

Elegant Wigs and Hairpieces - for the Jet Set! As advertised in the October 1966 issue of Ebony Magazine. Via