21 thoughts on “SNARK WEEK: Wait, Men Had Hairstyles Too?

  1. I’d have to say it’s a toss up between Man in the Iron Mask (w LDC), Roots, Any film about ERI, and dare I mention Braveheart.

    Rufus as Lord M I’ll give a pass the long sideburns would be accurate due to portrait but COVING HIS FACE IS A CAPITAL OFFENSE. Tom as Albert had longer sideburns.

  2. I love fashion history and I love this site, and I’ll gripe mightily about lace and darts and no hairpins, but I’m just shallow enough to not want some historically accurate but dorky hair style getting between me and my smoldery on-screen hotties.

  3. “Can you explain what Christoph Waltz’s hair has to do with these real portraits from 1630s Holland?” Yes! I can explain! “I am Christoph Waltz and I vahnt Mareceline, who alvays does my hair, to do my hair, or I valk! It’s in my contract!

    Actually, I think this often explains the inexplicable.

  4. The hair on Poldark (male and female) makes me very twitchy! But don’t mention it on any Poldark post on facebook!

  5. Patrick Swazye’s Orry Main in the North and South. Serious Mullet Hair!!!!!!!

  6. Well, most men at Louis XIV court slavishly copied the boss… Who’d lost most of his hair due to illness. So they clipped their own hair ultra short and slapped those gigantic wigs on.
    I have a hunch that if the set hairdresser came in with the clippers, there would be a panicked stampede!

  7. The main issue does seem to be volume, which is in the wrong place for some of these – it’s bouncy where it should be limp, and subdued where it should be huge. For example, the Borgia guy would actually look probably OK if you dumped a bucket of water over his head to de-boing his hair.

    I don’t know about the Christoph Waltz thing, given the variety of the 1630s portraits, it wouldn’t particularly stick out to me as egregious – it looks pretty close to the guy on the far right, top, and the beard is similarly shaped and grown to the guy immediately on his left (although rather shorter) So I dunno. I’d give Waltz a pass, based on this one image I can see of him, as he doesn’t seem that particularly out of place. Unless I’m missing a man-bun or bro-braid or something.

  8. Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love is my favorite. I’m guessing not very historically accurate, but he’s pretty dreamy.

    1. All the girls in my class were in lurve, and the teacher had a hard time getting us to move on.

  9. The dude from Timeless is a time traveler from2016, so I think he gets a pass for having modern hair.

    1. I KNOW, but it pains me b/c the whole idea is they’re supposed to blend in! Wouldn’t everyone be looking at him thinking “Who’s the guy with the weird haircut?”??!!

  10. The Borgias guy almost looks sort of a little right if you tilt your head just so and squint… It’s longish and needs brushing… that’s kinda…

    No. No it’s not. Not without liquor.

  11. This is so unfair of you! All you have to do to signify that men live in the Renaissance/Early Modern Europe is give them a close-trimmed beard and mustache and then put them in something vaguely doublet-y. Why are you being so unreasonable?

  12. I don’t know, some of these aren’t too bad But am wondering why you used a pic of Christopher Marlowe for Shakespeare. (Yes, I’m a Shakespeare nerd.)

    1. My guess is because we don’t have a reliable image of Shakespeare in the 1590s (when both those depictions are meant to be). The three probably-trustworthy images we have of Shakespeare – the First Folio engraving, the Stratford bust, and the Chandos portrait – all show him later in life, and so couldn’t be used as an example of 1590s hair.

      Marlowe’s putative portrait is from 1585, which still isn’t the 1590s, but… is closer, I guess? Personally I would’ve gone with the Grafton Portrait, which (1) is from 1588, so much closer to 1590s than any of the other options discussed here, and (2) has at least been discussed as a possible Shakespeare likeness, even if I personally think there’s no real evidence to support it. (If the putative Marlowe portrait is really him, IMO it’s more likely the Grafton is too, since there’s a close resemblance between the two.)

      Of course, they could’ve used any portrait from 1590s England, but my guess is they wanted someone from a similar milieu to Shakespeare since fashion is also affected by things like social class and occupation. So Marlowe, as a fellow playwright with a similar family background (who was also exactly the same age) makes sense as a point of comparison.

      (Signed, a fellow Shakespeare [and Marlowe] nerd who noticed this too and has far too many thoughts about it!)

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