1950s Hairstyles
There are few decades that felt as alive with possibility as the 1950s. The Second World War was over, and the world was slowly exhaling after years of fear and hardship. Women quietly expanded their horizons far beyond the front door. Alongside this quiet revolution, hair was there: styled, pinned, waved, and sprayed into unforgettable looks.
But fashion is never just about fashion. The hairstyles of the fifties reflected the mood of an entire era. A mood that prized femininity and a carefully composed appearance. Whether a woman chose soft romantic waves or a crisp chignon, her hair was a personal billboard for her identity and dreams.
The Poodle Cut
If one hairstyle sums up the cheerful spirit of the early 1950s, it is the poodle cut. Short, curly, and full of personality, this style looked exactly like what its name suggests: the tight, fluffy curls of a well-groomed poodle. And women adored it.
The poodle cut suited the post-war mood perfectly. After years of making do, women wanted something a little frivolous, a little fun. The poodle cut delivered exactly that. It was short enough to feel modern and fresh, yet curly enough to feel feminine.
To achieve the look, hair was cut short all over, then given a tight permanent wave to create the curls. A little wax or pomade would be worked through afterwards to give definition and a slight shine. The curls would be clustered tightly against the head, sometimes with a small fringe across the forehead. The overall effect was round, soft, and cute.
Women loved it for several practical reasons. The tight curls held their shape without any additional effort. Gone were the days of sleeping in uncomfortable pins and time-consuming touch-ups in the morning. And it made wonderful use of the home perm kits, meaning women could maintain the look themselves.
The actress Lucille Ball - already a beloved figure on American television with her hit show I Love Lucy - wore a variation of this hairstyle, and her red curls became as iconic as her comedy.
The Bouffant
If the poodle cut was playful, the bouffant was dramatic. This hairstyle was round, full of air and ambition, piled high on top of the head. The bouffant became one of the defining looks of the late 1950s and would only grow more theatrical into the 1960s.
To achieve the bouffant, a hairdresser would back-comb or tease the hair. That is, comb it backwards from the tip towards the root, which roughens the hair shaft and creates instant volume and lift. The outer layer of hair was then smoothed over the top to give a neat, rounded finish, and the whole construction was locked in place with hairspray.
It sounds complicated, and it was. Many women visited their hairdresser weekly specifically to have their bouffant set and sprayed. Some even slept with their head wrapped in a silk scarf or propped carefully on a special pillow to preserve the shape for an extra day or two.
The bouffant worked because it added height, which was flattering. It balanced out wider hips - a concern that was taken very seriously in the fifties - and gave women an imposing, elegant silhouette. Paired with a full skirt and a tiny waist, the effect was like something from a fairy tale.
Jackie Kennedy, who would become one of the most photographed women in the world as First Lady of the United States from 1961, started cultivating her elegant bouffant in the late 1950s. Her version was more conservative than some - opting for a rounded shape over height - but its influence was incalculable.
Victory Rolls
Not every trend of the 1950s was brand new. Victory rolls had been born during the Second World War, when women working in factories needed their hair off their faces but still wanted to look glamorous.
The style involved rolling sections of hair upwards and away from the face into firm, cylindrical tubes: sometimes two symmetrical rolls framing the face, sometimes a single large roll across the crown.
After the war ended, victory rolls did not disappear. They were too elegant, too flattering, and too deeply associated with feminine strength for women to give them up easily. Throughout the early 1950s, you would still see victory rolls worn for special occasions, evenings out, or by women who simply preferred a more structured look.
The rolls required patience to create. Sections of hair were smoothed, rolled upward, and pinned tightly in place. The result was a style that lifted the hair away from the face, showed off the cheekbones, and gave the wearer an air of capable elegance.
Pin Curls and Finger Waves
Before curling irons became widely available, pin curls were how millions of women achieved their waves and curls. The technique was simple but time-consuming: dampened hair was wrapped around the finger into a small, flat curl, then pinned against the scalp.
Dozens of these tiny curls might be pinned across the entire head, and then the woman would sit under a hairdryer - or simply sleep with her hair set overnight - before removing the pins to reveal a head of soft, even waves or curls.
Finger waving was a related technique with an older history, but it remained in fashion through the early fifties. Using a setting lotion and a fine-toothed comb, a hairdresser would work the hair into S-shaped waves that lay flat and smooth against the head. The waves were then covered with a hairnet and dried.
Both pin curls and finger waves required considerable skill and practice. Young women learned these techniques from their mothers and aunts, sitting together at the dressing table mirror on a Saturday evening before a night out.
The Chignon
For women who wanted to look sophisticated without a complicated bouffant, the chignon was the perfect solution. The chignon is simply hair that is smoothed back and twisted into a neat bun at the nape. In the 1950s, it became the ultimate expression of understated elegance.
Audrey Hepburn wore variations of the chignon throughout her career, and her influence on this style was enormous. Whether she was wearing it low and classic in Roman Holiday (1953) or higher and more dramatic in Sabrina (1954), she made the chignon look like the most natural, effortless thing in the world.
It was not, of course. Achieving the smooth, pulled-back look required careful combing, plenty of pins, and usually a good amount of hairspray. But it looked utterly simple, and that was exactly the point.
The chignon was also practical. It kept hair completely out of the face and off the neck, making it ideal for working women who needed a polished appearance all day long. It did not require regular trips to the hairdresser. A woman could arrange her own chignon in front of the bathroom mirror every morning.
The pageboy was an incredibly easy look to wear. Cut above the shoulders in a blunt line all the way around, with the ends turned smoothly inward, the pageboy sits somewhere between formal and casual.
In the 1950s, the pageboy was very popular with women who wanted a neat look without excessive fuss. Its clean lines suited the architectural aesthetic of 1950s design: the same instinct for order and purposeful shape that showed up in furniture, cars, and kitchen appliances appeared in the smooth curve of the pageboy's turned-under ends.
Setting the pageboy involved either large rollers or the careful use of a round brush during blow-drying, working the ends firmly inward as they dried. The result, held with a mist of hairspray, could last several days. Many women loved that the pageboy required less maintenance than a more elaborate style, while still looking chic.
Doris Day, the cheerful film star, wore variations of the pageboy that made the style feel approachable. Her golden, gleaming pageboy became as much a part of her identity as her sunny screen persona.
The Italian Cut
While many women of the 1950s embraced curls and waves, a bold minority were going dramatically short. The Italian cut - also called the "gamine" style - was a very short, textured crop that left a woman looking simultaneously boyish and intensely feminine. It was a daring contradiction, and it was stunning.
The Italian cut was inspired in part by the actresses appearing in the Italian films coming out of Rome and Milan in the early fifties. These films featured women who looked nothing like the carefully coiffed American ideal. They were natural, spontaneous, and fiercely beautiful in a way that felt new and exciting to international audiences.
Audrey Hepburn brought this look to mainstream attention in a spectacular way. Her gamine crop in Roman Holiday - cut short on screen in a scene that felt revolutionary - made women around the world reconsider what femininity could look like. If Audrey Hepburn could look that beautiful with that little hair, then perhaps short hair was not the sacrifice it had always seemed.
The Italian cut required a skilled hairdresser to execute well. The hair was cut with a razor rather than scissors in some cases, to create soft, wispy ends rather than blunt ones. It needed very little setting, and it suited women with fine facial features particularly well. It was the most low-maintenance style of the decade, and for that reason alone it attracted a devoted following.
The Rise of the Beehive
Strictly speaking, the beehive as we know it peaked in the early 1960s, but its origins are firmly rooted in the late 1950s. The beehive was the bouffant taken to its extreme: hair teased and piled into a tall, rounded cone on top of the head, resembling a beehive. It was audacious and theatrical.
The technique was essentially the same as for the bouffant but taken much further. Layers of backcombed hair would be arranged over a hidden foundation of padding, and then the outer surface would be smoothed, lacquered, and pinned into a dramatic vertical shape. A good beehive could add fifteen centimeters or more to a woman's height.
What drove women to these extraordinary heights was partly the culture of one-upmanship that has always existed in fashion. If your neighbor’s bouffant was bigger than yours last week, you came back with something taller this week. But it was also an expression of the decade's exuberance. The 1950s were, in many ways, about abundance: big cars, big kitchens, big families, big dreams.
The women who wore beehive styles in the late fifties were the avant-garde of their day. They were the ones who sat in the front rows of beauty shows, who devoured every new issue of fashion magazines, who took their hairdresser's creative suggestions seriously. They were the tastemakers, and what they wore in 1958 and 1959 would become mainstream in the sixties.
Soft Waves and Blonde Hair
Of all the hairstyles of the 1950s, perhaps none has endured in the imagination quite as powerfully as the soft platinum blonde waves associated with Marilyn Monroe. This was not a precise style like the chignon or the bouffant. It was something more romantic than that. It was hair that looked as though it had been blown gently by a breeze and happened to fall perfectly into soft, gleaming waves.
Marilyn's hair was achieved through a combination of bleaching, careful styling, and a great deal of professionalism. Her signature look involved hair bleached to a luminous platinum blonde, then set on large rollers to create soft, wide waves. After setting, the waves were carefully brushed out, with a light mist of hairspray to hold everything in place without making the hair look stiff.
The fifties saw an extraordinary obsession with blonde hair. Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Kim Novak, and Doris Day - some of the decade's biggest stars - were all blonde. With hair dyes and lighteners becoming more accessible than ever, sales of blonde hair products soared.
For women with naturally dark hair, the full Marilyn effect was not always achievable without considerable chemical intervention. But the waves - soft, romantic, and flattering - could be achieved in any color. Brunettes and redheads embraced the soft waves, making them one of the most worn styles of the entire decade.
The Beauty Parlor
To truly understand 1950s hair, you have to understand the beauty parlor. These were not simply places to have your hair done. They were social institutions, neighborhood hubs, and safe spaces for women in an era when women's lives were considerably more domestic and circumscribed than they are today.
A weekly visit to the beauty parlor was a fixture in many women's schedules, as regular as church on Sunday. You would sit in the shampoo chair and talk to the girl who washed your hair, then move to the stylist's chair for cutting, setting, or perming, and finally park yourself under the great domed dryer hood with a magazine and wait while your curls set. The whole process might take two hours or more, and most women did not mind a bit.
The conversations that happened in beauty parlors were, in their own way, revolutionary. In a decade when women were expected to be cheerful and content, the beauty parlor was a place where they could be frank. Marriages, children, money, ambition, dissatisfaction: all of it got talked about under the hair dryers, in voices pitched just above the noise of the machines. The beauty parlor was one of the few places in the 1950s where women could be fully themselves.
Hairdressers occupied an unusual position in their communities. They were confidantes, counsellors, and style authorities all at once. A good hairdresser knew what suited each client's lifestyle, what her husband liked, what she wanted, and what would flatter her face. The relationship between a woman and her hairdresser in the fifties was one of mutual trust.
Why We Still Love 1950s Hair
Decades come and go, and fashion moves in cycles, but the hairstyles of the 1950s have never fully gone out of our hearts. They appear every few years in fashion collections, on the red carpet, and in the choices of women who simply love the way they look. Why do they endure?
Part of the answer is craft. The hairstyles of the fifties required real skill to create: skill from the hairdresser and patience from the woman wearing them. There is something satisfying about a hairstyle that has been thought about and properly executed. In a world of increasingly casual beauty standards, the precision of a perfect chignon or a flawless pageboy feels almost radical.
Part of the answer is femininity. Whatever its complications and contradictions, the fifties produced an aesthetic of femininity that was romantic and sensual. The soft wave, the elegant updo, the curls: these are styles that celebrate the pleasure of beauty.
The women of the 1950s wore their hair with confidence, as an expression of who they were. That confidence is perhaps the most enduring lesson of all: then as now, the best hairstyle is the one worn with complete conviction.
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