When figuring out how to write this article, I had a bit of a tough time. 1) I don’t have as much free time as I would like. 2) I wasn’t born in the 1960s, and 3) I wasn’t sure exactly what angle I wanted to take on this issue, because it is a big issue, and I want to make sure I get everything I have to say said about it. So, I decided to tackle it by the sexes. I’ll show what a woman’s hair looked like in 1963 and then talk about the errors there are in the show concerning women’s hair. I’ll do the same for the men. Also, if anyone who’s reading this was actually around in the ’60s and wishes to correct me on some things, by all means, please do–I’m from 1988, after all.
Women
This video is not only very detailed, but it explains a lot of what I want to write without even using words. As you can see from the video, hairstyles in1963 were still fairly “tight”, for lack of a better word. We aren’t in the mid-60s yet, when straight styles were really beginning to pick up steam as well as mod cuts, and we most certainly aren’t in the late ’60s, where everyone’s wearing all types of different hairstyles, mostly long, straight styles, mod styles, or, for some African-American women, fluffy blown-out styles or afros.
Any woman of any ethnicity can wear these styles shown in the video. The only “bad” part about the styles is that they can get really complicated. There are varying ways in how to roller-set one’s hair; a good two-part video on that is this one (this tutorial is more about ’40s and ’50shair, but pin curls were still used in the ’60s, as you saw in the video above, and are still used today to some extent):
(There’s a much more detailed two-parter on pincurl theory at VividMakeup’s channel.)
I also need to add that the styles shown in the very first video are generally short and/or cropped. This is because it’s just 1963, only 4 years away from 1959. In the ’50s, short hair was very much the rage (think June Cleaver), so hair was still evolving away from that look. However, there were looks for women with longer hair, however, they imitate the shorter-hair styles to a degree; no hair is really left hanging below the jawline (incidentally, having hair above or at the jawline was a rule for Pan Am stewardesses).
After you do all of that hard work of pincurling and roller-setting and waking up with a headache from those darn rollers and bobby pins and then brushing everything out, there’s going to be TONS of hairspray used so that all that hard work doesn’t disintegrate once you step out into the sun or shake your head or sweat. That brings me to issue no. 1, which is that the women in the show have WAAYY too loose of hair.
(L-R: Laura, Colette, Kate) Example 1. Too loose of hair for the time period on Laura and Kate. Look at all of those freaking flyaways on Kate’s head! Colette, however, sports a Vidal Sassoon-esque cut. Credit: ABC
You can literally tell the hairstyles on most of the girls was done about an hour before they went on set. There’s loose tendrils everywhere, and sometimes, the curls don’t even looked brushed out enough. They’re certainly not ratted-out enough, since no one is wearing the bouffant hairstyle, something popular in the early 1960s. Why isn’t any girl wearing a bouffant? Out of all of the iconic ’60s hairstyles, NO ONE is wearing this one, the one most people think of when they think of that period. It’s actually a shame.
In a way, this was a really ugly time for hair even though the styles looked amazing–ratting out your hair can make it extremely tangled, and all that hairspray just makes it gunky. Think of having both tangles and hairspray stuck in your hair. Yikes. But the hair is an extension of people removing themselves from the “safe” 1950s–like the ’50s, there was this thought process of glossing over the ugliness of life with a “perfect” facade. The hair has a similar story–hide the nastiness with a smooth, perfect facade. The hair shown in Pan Am is the current “Shampoo, blow dry, and curl with a curling iron” hair. It looks too modern, which is not what the show should be going for. I say to go old school in both hair and mindset with this show. Just forget you’re in 2011, where there are PC rules. If you’re telling a story from the 1960s, you have to just tell it like it was, and that includes ratted-out hair.
I need to address Colette’s hair, because her hair is directly out of the Vidal Sassoon style of hairdressing.
According to Wikipedia, Vidal Sassoon, recreated the “bob cut” in 1963, called the five-point bob, and his severe, geometric, graphic styles were devoid of lacquer, meaning the shine of the hair came from the hair itself. I think people probably did wear Colette’s hairstyle in 1963, because Vidal Sassoon’s hairstyling was for the fashionable people of the world, whereas the bouffant styles above, while fashionable, were mainstream. And Pan Am stewardesses often did get their hair cut at the Vidal Sassoon studios, as quite a few stewardesses have mentioned in various interviews. Personally, I associate Colette’s hairstyle more with 1965, when the mod scene was entering its real heyday, but she’s still accurate to the period. Actually, she’s probably the most accurate to the period since her hairstyle wouldn’t qualify for any hairspray or other products. And she’s supposed to be the “edgy” one of the women, so the style fits her.
Men
I briefly discussed this hair article with one of my new SQPN “Secrets of Pan Am” friends Capt. Jeff, and he wrote this:
Speaking of hairstyles… one of our [SQPN] chat room stalwarts was a barber for 30 years (at least that’s what I think he said) and he claimed that they really got it wrong on the men’s haircuts, especially in the back. He said that almost every man’s hair was tapered in the back in the 60s.
So that’s straight from the source. Mr. Barber, I would love to be able to chat with you about where they got the hairstyles wrong on the show, so if you are reading this, please leave a comment!
In any case, our barber friend is right; the “classic” style is much more tapered in the back than that mess that is the back of Dean’s head, as you can see from the above video. Just look at how much hair Dean’s sporting back there!
Dean’s haircut is not good enough. Credit: ABC
I might be wrong, but Ted and Sanjeev’s haircuts look more on point than Dean’s does. They might have some bad points, too, but I do think I remember seeing some tapering going on. You can see it in this picture:
Sanjeev’s got more hair cut from his “kitchen” than Dean. Credit: ABC
Even if you go by James Dean standards, Dean the Pilot is still out of line. James Dean had a tapered back as well, even though he rocked a more rockabilly-style. The same goes for Marlon Brando and even Elvis, who was seen as outrageous and “immoral” in the 1950s (like how Prince was in the ’80s–his best period, if you ask me). No matter how rocker you were, you still had the hair on the back of your head tapered.
(L-R) James Dean, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley. Three headshots that show tapered backs of heads. Headshots found through Google.
I think Dean’s haircut is from a later date in the ’60s, when men started growing out their hair in the back a bit more. Men’s hair in1963, like women’s hair, was still “tight”; men’s hair didn’t migrate too far away from the 1950s style of hairdressing. And, similar to women, men’s hair was sometimes tamed by lots of hair grease.
I think that covers it on hair. There’s just some tweaking that needs to be done on the show; more attention to detail, more hairspray, and more hair cutting.
