Figure 1.--.
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Figure 1.--. |
Greasers preened their hair with various oils and lotions. Surfers refrained from the use of any greasy addition, but some liked the bleached outdoor look. Others carried combs. pocket mirrors, and even hair spray with them. Side burns grew in popularity. One editorialist warned, "Sideburns are creeping across America like crabgrass, wispy strands inching past the year and down the cheek of men and teenage boys, each one a pennant proclaiming, however, seedily, that inside the impersonal shell there lives a person. [Life, 1968] Teen age boys began spending as much time preening their hair as girls. The very nature of the American barber shop began to change. The once proudly male reserve of the barber shop stocked with sports and fishing magazines was replaced with boutiques and female barbers. Some boys wanted their hair teased and blow dried. Sculptured hair dos were formed with razors and not just clippers and scissors. It was the increasingly length of hair that stirred the passions of young and old alike. While younger boys did not normally adopt the long hair of their teenage brothers, the shaggy bangs of John F. Kennedy Jr. helped insire longer hair for the younger boys as well.
A young John Kennedy begins appearing in bangs, often shagily cut. A HBC reader reports, "As for JFK Jr., he was the same age as my little brother, so I vividly remember a Sunday supplement featuring a full-color picture of him on his first birthday, Nov. 1961. He had the long bangs and longish hair. It looked very odd and different to us. The John-John cut has a tremendous impct on the hair styling of younger boys--even after his father's assasination in 1963.
The Beatles did not set foot in America in February 1964. They arrived in New York, appeared on the Ed Sullivan show and then performed at the Washington, D.C. Coliseum. George visited his sister in America before that year, but the group first came to the U.S. in 1964. Of course American teenagers befian to take note of The Beatles and their hair style in 1862 and 63. Although their hair was of rather modest length, they were an important influence in the long hair fashion which was soon sweeping American and Western Europe.
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