29. The Switch to Short Male Hair
In the English Civil Wars, 1642 – 1651, long hair became associated with the royalist Cavaliers, while shorter hair became associated with the pro-Parliament Roundheads. The linkage of long male hair with aristocrats and short hair with commoners got an even bigger boost during the French Revolution. To distance themselves from the Ancien Regime, men adopted fashions radically different from those of the aristocracy. Also in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, long male hair came to be associated with adventurous and wild types, while shorter hair came to be associated with the staid and stolid. The decisive shift towards short hair for men began in the second half of the nineteenth century, and war played a key role. In the Crimean War and the US Civil War, the association between lice and disease – and diseases were bigger killers back then than bullets – was noted.
Soldiers cut their hair short for purposes of health and comfort. Many men took that army camp fashion back home with them upon their discharge from the military. The figure of the soldier as a masculine ideal reinforced that trend. The Industrial Revolution boosted that shift in the workplace, as long hair could prove dangerous around machinery. By the turn of the twentieth century, short male hair had become widespread. That norm was reinforced even further by World War I and the terrible sanitation and hygiene conditions endured by millions of soldiers in the trenches. Short, shorn, or even shaved-off hair was effective against endemic lice infestations. By the 1920s, short hair had firmly established itself as the male fashion norm, especially in the West and cultures influenced by the West.
