Connections/Bad Hair

My name is Peggy Fogelman and I head up Education at the Met and my topic is "Bad Hair."

Everyone I know is somewhat obsessed with their hair. If you say, "I'm

having a bad hair day," everyone knows what you're talking about. Part

of the reason that we obsess over it is because it's so integral to our identity.

Maybe it's because we can change it.

How frustrating is that, when you just can't get it to do what you want to do.

When I was four years old, every day was a good hair day. No matter how bad it looks

somehow, it always looks good. I always wanted hair

just like my mother's. She had her photograph taken at the age of nineteen, and it was the '40s. She looks like a movie star. My own hair never achieved that greatness. My mother

was constantly nagging me to get my hair out of my eyes and put it behind my ears and I always resisted. At that moment in your life, you're so obsessed with your hair, and you want it to look cool. And at the same time, you're so anxious about your looks that

you really wanna hide behind your hair, too. Bad hair for men can be a sign

of genius, and it looks like his hair has been electrified by the incredible intellectual workings of his brain. Women don't have such an easy time.

Bad hair indicates some very misplaced sense of style

and, you know, ineptitude at dressing oneself appropriately. Even

being the goddess of beauty doesn't absolve you from the responsibility to "Do your hair!" There are ways

that you could mitigate bad hair. It was traditional for Russian married women to wear hair coverings. The

metallic threads and the glass and the mother of pearl must have really shimmered in

candlelight, so that it would become a giant halo. You could also distract people

from your bad hair with really incredible hair ornaments.

We know that hair can be an incredibly soft, pleasurable experience to touch someone's hair, but it's

also an invasion of certain personal boundaries, you can't go up to anyone on the street and just touch their hair. So

we imagine as we are seeing the sense of touch.

These mourning brooches were a way of enabling someone to preserve the memory of their loved one and carry it with them wherever they went, and that was through their hair.

It was really conventional for mature women to wear their hair up. Only certain types of

women, at certain periods, would be seen wearing their hair down. It often has a suggestion of sensuality or

sexual availability. But it could also be kind of dangerous

like, fatal, in the case of Lilith.

As much as we struggle with our hair—straightening and curling and dyeing—and as much

anxiety as we have about our hair, it is something that

really identifies us in the minds and hearts of other people and

can be this wonderful repository for their memory of us. In the end, it really

is one of those things that most identifies us in other people's minds, and therefore can be a vehicle for

all the really positive feelings that they have about us.