When I wrote Tuesday in celebration of bald characters in literature, I didn’t mean to suggest that hair doesn’t make for a good story, too.
For proof, look no further than the new book “Whose Hair?,” from Laurence King Publishing, which features more than two hundred of Christina Christoforou’s precise illustrations of famous hair styles through the ages. Among the gems in the collection are the sympathetic coifs of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan on facing pages, Simon Cowell’s improbable shrub, the duelling headbands of nineteen-seventies Bjorn Borg and nineteen-eighties Bruce Springsteen, and Al Pacino’s infamous “Scarface” Caesar. And, of course, there’s that gray supernova featured on the cover.
The book contains a handy key, but what’s remarkable is how many of these haircuts tell us all that we need to know. Distinctive styles provide surprisingly good context, but Christoforou’s work also suggests that we might all be a bit too steeped in celebrity iconography for our own good. Test your skills in the slide show below (with captions taken from the book).
Illustrations: Christina Christoforou.
