Pompadour Women – Edwardian Hairstyles 1909
The San Francisco Call, March 28, 1909.
The 1900’s were drawing to a close, and with it Edwardian fashion and Edwardian hairstyles were taking their first baby steps into a new emancipated era for women. The era of the pompadour was coming to an end.
The Pompadour is getting smaller by 1909
A WOMAN’S glory is her hair.If a woman’s hair is not beautiful, then dears it is a simple case of neglect. Proper grooming will bring out dormant lights and rich tones In the dullest of locks, and with careful treatment a scanty crop can be increased to luxuriance.
Just now every woman has an abundance of hair! Dame Fashion has decreed it. With hair pillows and wire cages underneath, and curls and puffs and switches on top, it is a very easy matter to comply with her demands. The openness of all this artificiality robs it of offense, and it can not be denied that on the whole, the prevailing styles of hairdressing are very attractive and becoming.
The new hair modes are partly a response to the demands of the new millinery. The mass of hair extending out from the back of the head above the neck is to fill In that great cavern which exists under the brims of many of the new hats!
The pompadour in a modified form still holds its popularity, but it is much lower now in front than of old and very broad from side to side. The hats are also responsible for this development. For faces of a certain type the hair is parted in the middle and brought back in a softly waving mass on each side to the heavy puffed rolls behind. This style is new and very popular, but it is not becoming to every woman!
For the woman with serene and. regular features the style is peculiarly suitable, but the vivacious girl with an irregular profile had better adhere to the piquant waved pompadour.
There are two methods of preparing straight locks for the new coiffures. Both are called waves, but the Marcel wave is a shallow, regular undulation, like the little ripples along the beach, while the French wave has the deeper, more irregular curves of the sea farther out from shore. The French is nearer to the natural curl of the hair, but the Marcel is very popular and is especially effective with certain rather set styles of hairdressing.
Another of the new styles, which is a very old style revived, is the psyche knot. On precisely the right type of woman and with the coiffure well built, for it is a work of art not to be attempted by amateurs— the psycho knot has a peculiar charm of its own.But when it is not successful, its failure is conspicuous. There is a modified form of the psyche that is less extreme, and this has been much more generally accepted.
A single curl is pinned in on each side at the back of the head.There are some faces to which any of the low styles of hair arrangement are not becoming and for these the hair dressers, have created a new high coiffure, which consists of. a large central puff in front, surrounded on three sides by a series of smaller puffs, mix or eight in number, all arranged on the crown of the head.
The accompanying illustrations show the main -tendencies of the new styles in hair dressing. A lower and broader effect over the forehead, with the hair waved and softer in appearance than formerly and sometimes parted in the middle; the low dressing of the hair in the back and a rolled and puffed arrangement of the back hair generally.
Images courtesy of Duke Library – Edwardian Ladies -photographed by Hugh Mangum – 1907 to 1910
Read A Frolic through Time – an excellent period blog.
Just 30 years later, the hairstyles of the early 1940’s echoed the Edwardian era, with the pompadour for women becoming hugely popular once more.
That’s all !
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