You can date a photograph more often by the line of a woman's hair than by what she is wearing. A dress is a season; a haircut is an era. The bob, the marcel, the beehive, the wedge, the shag, the Farrah, the Rachel. Each one tied to a year, a city, and a name behind the chair. Most of them tied to a moment when something old gave way. What follows is a history of women's hairstyles, told one cut at a time.
We walk through that century in the order it happened, from a Paris salon in 1909 to the freehand grow-out we work with now. The cuts that shaped how women wore their hair, and the ones we still see referenced when a client sits down and shows us a photograph from her phone.
The cut that opens the century
The first thing that broke from Victorian arrangement was the bob, and most accounts credit it to Antoni Cierplikowski. He was a Polish hairdresser working in Paris under the professional name Monsieur Antoine, later known as Antoine de Paris. In 1909 he gave a short haircut to an actress, said he had been thinking about Joan of Arc, and a century of women's hair quietly began.
He charged what was then an unimaginable sum, reportedly up to five hundred francs for a single styling. His clients included Coco Chanel, Sarah Bernhardt, Greta Garbo, and later Eleanor Roosevelt and Brigitte Bardot. He is often described as the world's first celebrity hairdresser. The cut itself, however, did not take quickly. In 1909 most women still wore their hair long and pinned. The bob existed; it had not yet been allowed.
Irene Castle, and the case for short
The cut crossed to America through Irene Castle, the dancer and Vogue regular. She is credited with introducing American women to the bob in 1913 or 1914, the date varies by source. The version she wore became known as the Castle bob, and Vogue covered it widely.
Castle had reasons that were practical as much as fashionable. She was a working performer, and short hair was easier to manage under the demands of touring. What she did, by wearing it on stage and in the press, was give the bob a respectable face. A woman who cut her hair short before Irene Castle was a woman making a statement. After her, she was a woman who had simply made a choice.
The shingle, the Eton crop, and the marcel
By the early 1920s the bob had become the cut of a generation. Antoine produced a tighter, closer variation called the shingle, and the Eton crop went shorter still. The flapper read as much from the haircut as from the dropped waist. The line of the head changed how a hat could sit, how a collar could be cut, and how a dress could fall. The architecture of the silhouette had moved.
Set into all of this was the marcel wave, named for Marcel Grateau, the French hairdresser who developed the technique using heated tongs in the 1870s. Different accounts give 1872 or 1875. The wave itself was old; the 1920s made it ubiquitous, partly because the new short hair gave the iron something to grip. It is worth saying out loud: the cuts and the technologies arrived together. You cannot have the marcel without the tong, nor the shingle without the right pair of scissors.
Hollywood softens the line
The 1930s pulled back from the architectural shorts of the 1920s and let the wave do more work. Hair lengthened a little, finger waves replaced the iron in many salons, and the screen began to set the look. The platinum blondes of the period set off a global appetite for lift, and salons started taking peroxide more seriously.
What ended in the 1930s was the idea of a single radical cut. From here, the decade was set by a register more than by a single shape. Soft, curled, considered, photographed in low light. The bob did not disappear; it simply learned a new manner.
Restraint, in wartime
The 1940s arrived with constraints. Materials were rationed, pin curls did the work of perms, and the head was often covered for work. The cuts that survived the decade had to hold themselves with bobby pins and patience. Victory rolls, named for the war, were one answer. Long hair set into rolls at the front was another.
What we notice, looking at the archive, is how much of the styling was done at home. The salon visit was not yet the weekly ritual it became in the 1950s. The mirror over the kitchen sink did much of the work, and the cuts of the period respected that.
The weekly set, and the bouffant rises
The 1950s reopened the salon as a social space. The soft set, the curlers, the dryer hood, and the weekly appointment formed a ritual that lasted two generations. Women washed their hair once a week and slept in pins. The cuts themselves were varied, but the finish, set and held, was constant.
By the end of the decade the bouffant was rising. Volume at the crown, pinned high, lacquered in place. The line of march was towards the 1960s and what was about to be done with a hat called the fez.
Margaret Heldt, and a hat called the fez
The beehive belongs to Margaret Vinci Heldt of Chicago. In 1960, Modern Beauty Salon magazine commissioned her to design a new hairstyle to mark the coming decade. She had been thinking about a velvet fez-shaped hat she owned, and she built the height up from there. To finish it she added a small bee-shaped hat pin. A reporter from the magazine looked at it and said: it looks just like a beehive, do you mind if we call it the beehive. She did not mind.
It is a useful reminder that not every defining cut came from London or Paris. The beehive came from Illinois, from a working salon owner who had won the National Coiffure Championship in 1954. It is also a reminder that the names that stick are usually the names a journalist gave the work, not the names the hairdresser chose.
Vidal Sassoon, and the cut as architecture
If the beehive was the high point of the lacquered finish, Vidal Sassoon was the answer that followed. Working in London through the early 1960s, he cut hair as though it were a building. Sharp lines. Heavy weight at the perimeter. No setting. No lacquer. You washed it; it fell into place.
In 1964 he cut the five-point on the model Peggy Moffitt, an asymmetrical bob that worked because of how it was cut, not how it was finished. He went on to make a short pixie for Mia Farrow on Rosemary's Baby in 1968. What Sassoon proved, and what shifted the trade, was that the cut itself could do the work the setting used to do.
We still feel his argument at the chair: get the shape right with the scissors, and the daily routine after takes care of itself. That is the case we make at every consultation, and the longer note on what the chair has taught us about the craft walks through it in fuller detail.
Paul McGregor, and a cut he called the Funky
The 1970s shifted the line again, this time downwards and inwards. Paul McGregor, working in New York, cut Jane Fonda's hair around 1969 for what would become the film Klute, released in 1971. He called the cut the Funky. The world ended up calling it the shag.
The shag worked because it broke a rule. It was layered, it was uneven, it looked lived-in. Hair could be glamorous and also informal. It could be photographed in a studio and also worn on the street. What McGregor gave the decade was permission for the cut to look slightly undone.
Farrah Fawcett, and the flicked layer
In 1976, Charlie's Angels premiered and Farrah Fawcett's hair, flicked back in long winged layers, became one of the most copied haircuts of the century. She was styling her own hair for much of that year, and lemon juice was lifting her blondes by the pool. The look did the rest. The Farrah-do, sometimes called the Farrah-flip, kept salons busy through the late 1970s and into the early 1980s.
It marked something. The flicked layer was a cut that needed the right tools at home: a round brush, a hair dryer, the discipline to set the wings each morning. The salon was now competing with the bathroom mirror.
The decade of volume
The 1980s did not really commit to a single cut. The decade was about volume, set by perms, held by mousse and lacquer. Shoulder pads above, bouncy curls below. Working women, the new visible class, wore their hair as architecture again, though with none of Sassoon's restraint.
What survived the decade is the perm, much improved since, and a shared cultural memory of hair that occupied space. Looking back, most clients describe their 1980s hair with a smile and a faint apology.
The Rachel, and the cut everyone tried
The last cut to belong to a single year was the Rachel. Jennifer Aniston wore it on the second season of Friends, broadcast through 1995 and 1996. Her stylist gave her a long graduated layer that fell forward around the face. Salons through 1996 and 1997 were full of women asking for it by name.
What is worth saying about the Rachel is what we learned from it at the chair. The cut needed daily blow-drying and the right hair texture to fall as it did on television. The women who asked for it sometimes loved it; many discovered the difference between a cut on a celebrity's head with a professional blow-out and the same cut on their own head on a Tuesday morning. The conversation about grow-out, and about what a cut actually requires at home, started here for many of us. It is the same conversation behind what a keratin blowdry actually does for clients whose texture fights them every morning.
We still have that conversation every day. The colourist's method for growing colour out began with cuts like the Rachel and the lessons they left behind.
Freehand, and the long grow-out
The cuts that have shaped the last twenty-five years are less crisp than the ones that came before. The Rachel was the last cut to name a year. What replaced the named cut was the personal cut: bespoke shaping, considered colour, hand-painted highlights that grow out as the client lives her life. Balayage, the French word for to sweep, has its origins in Paris in the 1970s; the precise lineage is variously credited across the city's salons and is sometimes contested. By the 2010s it had become the dominant way to highlight hair in Glasgow and across the UK.
We sit somewhere in that lineage. Twenty-eight years on the chair, working from a single chair on the south side of the city. Nuzhat has been a colourist since 1997. The salon has been at No. 386 Paisley Road West since 2020. What we paint now we paint freehand.
What hand-painting actually means at the bowl, and why a balayage is judged at week twelve rather than at the door, is the subject of a separate piece on the technique for anyone wanting the detail.
Grey blending follows the same logic, the work done so the line is invisible at the parting and forgiving as it grows. The colourist's guide to grey blending walks through what that means in practice.
The chair you only leave when the work is right.
What the century tells us, at the chair
A century of women's hair, walked end to end, makes one thing plain. The cuts that earned their decade were the cuts that gave a woman something: a release, a permission, a way of carrying herself she did not have before. The bob gave the working woman a head she could wash quickly. The Sassoon five-point gave the modern woman a cut that did not need setting. The shag gave the 1970s woman a hair she could wear to the office and to a Saturday. The freehand balayage gives the modern woman a colour she does not have to come back for every six weeks.
The other thing the century tells us is that the cuts that lasted were the cuts that were considered. They came out of a single chair, a single conversation, a single hand. The named eras are over, but the work is not. The consultation is still where it starts, and the chair is still where it ends.
If you have read this far and are thinking about coming in, the journal piece on the salon itself, a hairdresser on Paisley Road West, by appointment since 2020, tells you what to expect on the day.
We see them all, the women carrying a Castle bob, a Sassoon line, a Farrah flick, a Rachel layer. Mostly we see the women who want a cut and a colour that is theirs, not a year's. The work starts at the consultation, and the appointment is held just for them. Book one when you are ready, and we will give the conversation the time it needs.