'Beloved Hair' exhibition at Musee de quai Branly, Paris.

As part of my trip to Paris in March 2013 I visited the Musee de quai Branly to view an exhibition dedicated to the history of hair. The exhibition is running from September 2012 until July 2013, so it was a great opportunity to get to see it whilst it was in Paris.

www.quaibranly.fr

The exhibition began by looking at a range of busts from various different eras and countries; focussing strongly on the contrast between Western hair and black hair with two sets of white and black busts facing each other. I found the black busts to be of the most interest as black hair is not something that I have ever worked with and I imagine it to be quite wild and unmanageable. A lot of the busts seemed to back this theory up with the models having quite unruly hair, both male and female.
Next the exhibition moved onto the contrast in hair colours; particularly looking at paintings and photographs that incorporate a stark contrast between blond, brunette and red haired models.

The section of the exhibition that I found to be most interesting was a section in the centre that was playing a documentary video focussing on the public head shaving of French women in 1944 as a punishment for having relations and often children with German soldiers during the war. This is something that I had heard about briefly but never really researched into any further. The footage was quite shocking and I would have very much liked to have stayed and watched the entirety of the film, however, as we were on a moving tour I was unable to stay very long. It is something that I would definitely like to look into further in the future as it signifies just how important hair is to a woman and how much of a humiliation it can be to be forced to lose it.

knotmydayjob.blogspot.com

Another section that I was particularly fascinating was the shrunken heads as I had heard of the concept before but somehow did not quite believe that it could actually be done and that the tiny, shrivelled faces in front of me were once fully sized human hea
ds. What was most intriguing about the information we were given was that, although some of the heads were taken from tribal enemies in battle, a lot of the heads were just taken from found dead bodies and were of no significance at all. It would appear that the process of creating shrunken heads was so lucrative that it was not as a mark of honour, remembrance for the deceased or a sign of triumph in battle as I had originally anticipated.

The exhibition continued into many other sections of interest, including a section comparing some of the most extreme hair styles from every continent. The Asian hair culture was very concerned with heritage and there was even a head piece that was described as containing hair from women of every generation of a family that was passed from grandmother to mother, mother to daughter, etc, for hundreds of years.

Overall the exhibition was a very eye opening experience and I feel very privileged to have learnt so much about a subject that I was previously so unfamiliar with. I would not say that it has motivated me to take up hair design as a primary interest, however, I will definitely give it further consideration when creating overall designs in the future as a result of what I have seen.