At last, the Eighties revival I've been waiting for has arrived. It's not just the bright string vests, big feather earrings and garish belts, but the hair, too. The last time I could hold my head up high and flaunt my big mass of curly hair was in about 1985. Unfortunately, I was seven years old and I was still subject to parental controls and hairbrushes. When I became a teenager, sleek hair was in. But no matter how much money I spent in TopShop, I could never be at the cutting edge of fashion because my hair would never be straight and smooth like everyone else's.
I didn't know it then, but the idea that curly hair is sensuous, the hair of mystery and desire, has a long history. Think of Botticelli's Venus or the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. To Edward Burne-Jones, the perfect model had "high cheekbones and abundant, curly red or brown hair". But sexy women are dangerous women. Mr Brocklehurst knows this in Jane Eyre. When he examines the pupils at Lowood School, he spots a girl with curly hair. The curls, he says, are "in defiance of every precept and principle of this house". The information that the girl's hair curls naturally does not calm him: "Yes, but we are not to conform to nature; I wish these girls to be the children of Grace . . . I will send a barber tomorrow."
At one stage, Disney's film The Princess Diaries had a lead with curly hair. But being European royalty, she had to be made over, and emerged with straight hair. Gretchen Heber, co-founder of naturallycurly.com, an American website that celebrates curly hair, called for a boycott of The Princess Diaries.
She got to the nub of the matter. "Beauty in America," she said, "has always been represented by people who are white. Since most white people have straight hair, this has become the accepted standard of beauty here." Ray Seymour, general secretary of the National Hairdressers' Federation, argues that people copy the styles of the most popular celebrities, be they the powdered wigs of kings or the ever-changing styles of David Beckham. Fashion hierarchy thus reflects other hierarchies in society. If people at the top are straight-haired, others will imitate them, so that straight hair becomes associated with success in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Heber agrees. "Many of our readers have said they weren't treated as favourably in job interviews when they wore their hair curly as when they straightened it. Many say they straighten their hair for a 'more professional' look." Heber gives the actress Kim Delaney as an example: "When she was a gritty street detective on NYPD Blue, she wore her hair naturally curly. When she got her own [short-lived] series playing a lawyer, she straightened her hair, suggesting curly heads aren't capable of arguing cases."
So why the sudden fashion for curls? Well, as medieval landlords knew, the way to keep an oppressed people down is to provide some form of organised rebellion or carnival allowing the temporary inversion of social power. Just as landlords would dress as peasants on carnival day, so the straight-haired majority goes through phases of perms and rollers. But carnivals are soon over: just as landlords become landlords again, false curls become straight and order is restored. This time next year, if my curls are still fashionable, I'll eat the hat I'm wearing to cover them.
