Why did people start wearing wigs?

Wigs have long been worn to hide hair loss, act out learned professions, or for fashion. The donning of wigs by barristers, artists such as Andy Warhol, and cancer patients who have lost their hair during chemotherapy each have their historical precedents.

There was, however, one period when wigs were especially popular – only to become widely mocked. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, wigs passed from the aristocracy into the populace. They were worn to mimic the great and the good, and to hide bad health (even if it was said that heavy false hair caused headaches).

Wigs were expensive, but they could be altered and upgraded according to whim. While always playful, wig-wearing and making became art – one Parisian peruke-maker even ventured into writing tragedies, before Voltaire rebuffed his artistic pretension.

Wigs became so widespread – and tall – that they reached a tipping point. Quite literally. No longer coveted accessories worn exclusively by the elites, the hairpieces became everyday items that were ridiculed in plays, cartoons and books. In a German play from around 1800, a cat has kittens in a judge’s wig; in a typical British caricature a pug pees in a periwig. And in a mock memoir of an old wig, the object that once marked social status and taste had fallen into a shoe-polisher’s bag.

Wigs now signified the old order. A new age of natural hair and liberty was supposedly unleashed. In 1801, the German author Friedrich Nicolai published a treatise on wig-wearing among ancients versus the moderns. And so w(h)ig history was written…

Seán Williams, senior lecturer in German and European cultural history at the University of Sheffield