June 14, 2021

The Joy of Black Hair

At the end of the last century, advances in weaves, wigs and other innovations allowed for a new degree of autonomy — and fun.

By Sandra E. Garcia, Photographs by Philip-Daniel Ducasse, Styled by Carlos Nazario (originally published 5/10/21)

CHAPTER 1

IN FEBRUARY 1994, Ellin LaVar, then a 32-year-old Manhattan hairstylist, went to a client’s house in Mendham, N.J., for a home appointment. In the kitchen, she prepared the woman’s hair for a wash by removing the extensions that she had previously put in, using her shears to snip the tiny stitches that fastened the wefts — individual strands of hair that are sewn together to create extensions — to her client’s cornrows. Once she had taken those out, LaVar began to unravel the minuscule braids she had plaited months before, starting at the nape. Using her fingers, she carefully unwound them section by section, until all that was left was the woman’s natural hair. After her client took a shower in one of her four bathrooms, LaVar blow-dried her hair and, over the next hour, once again braided each section of the soft hair into thin cornrows. The woman’s hair was naturally fine and, because she often attended events, she was accustomed to this laborious, time-consuming process.

Chapter 1: On the rise of strong “oriental” fragrances that reflected the political and cultural landscapes of their time, the 1980s.

Chapter 2: On ’90s-era advances in weaves, wigs and other Black hairstyles that ushered in a new age of self-expression.

Chapter 3: On botanical oils, a simple fact of life in much of the world that, here in the West, began to take on an almost religious aura in the 2000s.

Chapter 4: On men wearing makeup, a practice with a long history, but one that has really taken off in the last decade.

Hair extensions can be applied with clips, tape or bonding glue but, in the West, the term “weave” specifically refers to wefts that are connected to a person’s braids, a system patented in 1952 by a woman from Louisiana named Christina Jenkins. Though extensions have been used by women (and others) across the world for millenniums, the weave — as a technique, a terminology and an aesthetic unto itself — came to prominence in America in the second half of the 20th century, first among Black women and then in the culture at large.

Black women, of course, have long been familiar with the appropriation of their symbols, style, aesthetic and language. But even so, even now, the weave remains theirs: It’s become synonymous with aspirational Black beauty, name-checked in, say, Afroman’s 2004 “Whack Rappers” (“What a girl want, what a girl need / A ... job and a brand-new hair weave”) or in Beyoncé’s 2006 “Get Me Bodied,” in which she encourages listeners to pat their weaves — which helps with the occasional scalp itch. Weaves are often, erroneously, defined as straight hair extensions that simply add length, but they’re more complex and diverse than that. They can be used to create fullness or texture. They can be installed all over the head or added as a single track to create bangs or asymmetrical styles. Obviously, like all hair extensions, a weave is an enhancement, but its correct application can make it appear natural, even self-grown. It’s not just style — it’s sorcery.

That night in New Jersey, LaVar, who had been working with weaves since the 1970s, took a short break for dinner with her client, then continued her task. Now that the woman’s hair was fully braided, LaVar threaded a weaving needle with a long piece of cotton string and began sewing in some 20 wefts of silky, straight, foot-long human hair, purchased from Extensions Plus, a company in Tarzana, Calif. She and her clients — and nearly everyone else — prefer human hair, often sourced from Asian donors, because it’s more lightweight than synthetic alternatives and can withstand heat and color styling. The pattern LaVar weaves in varies; this time, her client requested versatility and manageability. When LaVar was finished a few hours later, the woman had an auburn, shoulder-length bob with sharp bangs.

Two weeks later, on the evening of the 36th Annual Grammy Awards, LaVar visited her client again. That night, they met at a hotel near Radio City Music Hall — she had just 30 minutes to style the woman’s hair. LaVar used a large-barrel iron to create loose curls and twisted the back into a French roll. Around the temples, she arranged a few chin-length strands to frame her client’s face. Her hair completed, the woman changed into a form-fitting, white scoop-neck dress. And then LaVar’s client, Whitney Houston, who was 30 at the time, headed onstage to open the Grammys with her now-legendary rendition of “I Will Always Love You.” It was a huge night for Houston, who dominated the event, winning three of its biggest awards. In one evening, she became an icon of international style. And so did her weave.

CHAPTER 2

BLACK PEOPLE HAVE always communicated with their hair. In 2008, archaeologists in Tell el-Amarna, Egypt, an excavation site between Luxor and Cairo, found human remains from the 14th century B.C. with intact hairstyles. Some had more than 70 braids, with extra human hair worked into them to add length. These early weaves, likely styled with wax or grease, were attached in a way that allowed their owners to take their extensions off and update their hairstyles.

Later, in the 1500s, according to oral tradition, Black people who’d been enslaved in Africa braided rice and grains into their hair that they hoped to plant after arriving in then-unknown lands. In South America, legend holds that, in the 1600s, enslaved people plaited routes to freedom in their hair, carrying intricate maps right on their heads. After Reconstruction in the United States, Black women, no longer enslaved but nonetheless ostracized, began to fashion themselves after white people; in the early 1900s, Sarah Breedlove (a.k.a., Madam C.J. Walker) became the first Black female millionaire in part by selling hot combs and other products that enabled straight hair. At-home chemical relaxers, developed around the same time by the inventor Garrett Morgan and a drugstore staple by the 1950s, offered a more permanent solution.

In the years since, Black women in America have consistently created decade-defining hairstyles. In the 1960s, many wore heavy, synthetic wigs that recalled Aretha Franklin’s beehive or the Supremes’ bouncy flip, both of which were born from the need to assimilate to white beauty standards in order to convey a marketable image — this was before Blackness was something to be celebrated, much less marketed. By the 1970s, in defiance of that oppressive whitewashing, many women grew heavily picked-out Afros in homage to the activist Angela Davis, who lamented years later that she would be “remembered as a hairdo.” The era’s Black Power movement encouraged women to embrace their Blackness, including their natural hair texture, but Afros soon came to be viewed as threatening by whites, and many young professionals who wore them were fired from their jobs. In the 1980s, that defiant shape was chemically softened, smoothed onto perm rods and doused in hair oil to create the Jheri curl, a juicy style that became a punchline for the stains it left behind on couches, jackets and car seats.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the weave morphed from a little-discussed but everyday aspect of Black hair into its own fully realized genre. In some ways, a hairdo like Houston’s was a throwback to the 1960s, crafted to appease all audiences, which also meant diminishing the performer’s own Blackness. Houston was often criticized by her Black fans for singing “white songs” — her music was, some said, too pop, too produced — and for maintaining an image that, with her flirty tendrils, appeared too polished, too polite. She had been crafted to be a global megastar, not a Black one. And yet while Houston was being presented as a sweet, soft, slim, dutiful wife, mother and daughter, the ideal girl next door, she was still irrefutably Black and, therefore, through her very existence, challenged America’s idea of what a Black woman could be or look like.

So did her perfect hair, to which other Black women responded with their own tributes and interpretations. The model Naomi Campbell and the singer Mary J. Blige also wore weaves styled by LaVar, though theirs projected a tougher image. Campbell and Blige had attitude; they could be luxe and street at the same time — they weren’t burdened by the same pressures as Houston was. And so, Black women who wanted to be seen as fierce and no-nonsense requested versions of the waist-length weave that Campbell wore on magazine covers. Others, who wanted to convey strength and soulfulness, mimicked Blige’s now-signature caramel hue.

A weave gave a woman the armor she needed to face the world. Not because it provided thicker hair, or longer hair, but because it allowed for versatility: She could go from dark, elbow-length strands to an above-the-chin crop without having to cut, much less touch, her actual hair. (Very few Black women wore their hair natural in the ’90s.) She might wear long chocolate strands with a deep side part like Aaliyah one week, then get an edgy blonde asymmetrical bob like T-Boz from TLC the next. Wearing a weave meant there was nothing to forsake, nothing to commit. Life had possibility, and weaves gave women the freedom of self-invention and reinvention. Black women were no longer tethered to what society had prescribed for them. They no longer had to adhere to the narratives that had pigeonholed them since birth. They were, as they have always been, fully expressive, experimenting with their own identities, crafting themselves piece by piece to make their own self-portrait, one dreamed up by and created for themselves alone. A weave allowed for opportunities denied them by a bigoted society: A weave was play; it was autonomy; it was self-expression. And even when life was difficult, a weave was something pleasurable — a weave, in the end, was joyful.

While creating the sewn-in, ’90s-inspired looks that appear in this story, the 37-year-old New York- and London-based hairstylist Jawara Wauchope — who collaborates with Cardi B and Solange, among other artists — also wanted to pay tribute to the short, shiny, French-twisted and finger-waved natural styles that the women in his family wore in the 1990s during his childhood in Kingston, Jamaica, where he began working in his aunt’s salon at the age of 7. “When I was growing up, my sisters would be the only two girls in church who didn’t have a weave,” he says. “My mother forbade it.” Eventually she relented, realizing not only that her daughters wanted to look like their friends but that extensions would protect their hair. Wauchope didn’t want to ignore that legacy, nor the renewed interest in natural hair among Black women today. “Sometimes when I see in passing, I’m like, ‘Wow,’ ” he says. “It feels — in a word — free.”

CHAPTER 3

BUT IF WEAVES were now a vehicle for self-assertion, they began as a solution to a problem. It’s strange to recall that weaves were once considered taboo to discuss, merely an answer to thin or damaged hair. Since the 1950s, most Black women had at one point chemically straightened their hair using products that deteriorated the shaft. “We didn’t know what we were doing with the home perm kit — hair could fall out, and that was hard,” says Belinda Trotter-James, 60, who in 1992 founded the magazine Hype Hair as a beauty guide for Black teenagers. “That’s when getting a weave or extensions came into play.”

Originally, extensions were typically sewn onto hair that was braided thickly around the crown. Stylists often added 12 to 15 ounces of hair — these days, six to eight ounces is considered more than enough — in a circular pattern, which caused the wefts to rise into a cone over time as the braids lost their hold, giving people helmet head. “It looked artificial, like a big wig,” LaVar says. To create a more natural look, she pioneered two techniques that allowed her to install a nearly undetectable weave. She either braided the hair in individual sections with intertwining strands or sewed the extensions onto cornrows in a pattern that complemented the way she wanted them to fall. Word spread of her creativity and of her softer, bespoke styles, which came to include Nia Long’s cropped tomboy cut, Lisa Bonet’s bohemian shag, even Catherine Zeta-Jones’s waterfall mane.

Now 60, LaVar still owns a namesake salon on New York’s Upper West Side, where clients regularly request the looks she developed in the 1990s — particularly Campbell’s long, sleek weave, which the model has worn for nearly three decades, and which has of late seen a resurgence on Instagram and in music videos. In fact, many of the hairstyles worn by Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé — not to mention the Kardashian-Jenner sisters, and scores of other famous women who aren’t Black — are indebted to LaVar’s innovations. In personalizing the weave, offering clients choice when it came to color, length, texture and hair thickness, she inspired a generation of shape-shifters. “We owe that to the ’90s,” says Jawara Wauchope, 37, a New York- and London-based hairstylist. “Being able to change the silhouette of the hair all the time was revolutionary.”

If the ’90s were the decade of the weave, they were also the era of significant hair advancements. Stylists were continually educating themselves, learning new techniques to try on their increasingly curious clients. Some mastered weaves that appeared seamless, while others created campier looks whose appeal was their artifice — many of today’s popular looks, with their pastel shades and waist-skimming lengths, were born out of the those experiments. Some of the ’90s’ most memorable styles — especially the structured, gravity-defying ones — originated on the streets and at hair shows, trade events for those in the beauty industry, in cities like Atlanta, Houston and Detroit. During these contests, stylists from across the country would craft hairdos that resembled the tail of a peacock, for instance, or a four-by-four, complete with wheels, hiked two feet above a model’s head. There were no rules: Extensions, partial wigs, tracks, weaves — all of it was fair game, a fantasia of Black hair innovation.

CHAPTER 4

BEYOND HAIR, THE ’90s were aesthetically significant for another reason: These were the years in which luxury brands finally embraced Black celebrities, an affiliation that would change fashion forever. Rappers wore Prada and Fendi; supermodels like Tyra Banks and Veronica Webb became the faces of Yves Saint Laurent and Revlon. The same themes that defined the decade — opulence, excess, decadence — trickled down into everyday hairstyles and clothes. Black women were ready to spend on the visions of themselves they imagined after seeing Janet Jackson walk the red carpet or Robin Givens star in 1992’s “Boomerang,” in which she plays a marketing boss, complete with a flowy, layered weave. Weaves, then, became the more achievable, affordable entry point: You might not be able to have the dress or the jewels, but you could have the hair. “Back then, ladies wanted their hair to last,” until their next appointment weeks later, says Gabrielle Corney, 47, a New York-based hairstylist. “That was how you were judged as a stylist.”

And yet, the true legends changed their hair constantly, an expression of the bravado that came to define hip-hop. Rappers like Lil’ Kim were rarely seen in public wearing the same wig twice (a move that has since inspired Megan Thee Stallion). The R&B singer Monica began her career in the early ’90s with a pixie cut but transitioned to a flawless, pin-straight shoulder-length weave by the time she duetted with Brandy on “The Boy Is Mine” in 1998. The way these women crafted their image and their art continued to evolve simultaneously, as manifestations of their changing selves.

The American definition of cool was also shifting. Since at least the 1970s — when Bo Derek wore cornrows in the movie “10” (1979), a questionable choice later replicated by Kim Kardashian West — being fly, fresh or sexy had meant channeling the Black American aesthetic. In music, especially, Blackness was often usurped and appropriated, while many artists, from the Supremes to Ray Charles, were unwilling to attach their images or private lives to their music for fear of being rejected by their audiences and record labels. By the ’90s, however, the public wanted more personal ways to connect with artists (not to mention more diverse artists). Hip-hop and R&B stars gave women of all races and ethnicities personae to imitate, whether those were defined by elegance or an unapologetic ghetto fabulousness.

Many singers hired Misa Hylton, now 47, who has styled Mary J. Blige and Lil’ Kim and defined the ’90s’ alchemy of glut and glamour. By collaborating directly with hairstylists and makeup artists, she created cohesive looks that imprinted themselves onto the collective cultural imagination, whether it was Blige in her dark brown Mongolian fur coat for 1996’s “Not Gon’ Cry” video, or Kim in her kaleidoscope of primary-color looks for 1997’s “Crush on You.” That video’s director, Lance Rivera, reportedly wanted to update a scene from 1978’s “The Wiz,” a Black-centric adaptation of 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz,” in which the Emerald City transforms from green to red to gold. Hylton decided Kim’s outfits and hair should do the same, morphing from a fringed crimson style to a cerulean girl-flip bob to a lime-green Twiggy-adjacent crop before finally arriving at a curly, dandelion-yellow messy updo similar to those that had been popularized at hair shows.

The video forever changed the way color was used in hair: It was no longer clownish but something that conveyed style and character. Hylton collaborated on the wigs with the Chicago-based hairstylist Eugene Davis, now 52. “I figured we could do contemporary cuts, shapes and styles with the bold colors,” he recalls. “I had no idea that that would be what revolutionized how Black women — how all women — looked at color.” In recent years, those bright, winkingly unreal ’90s looks have been regularly replicated, both by Black artists, like Nicki Minaj, SZA and Rihanna, and by white pop stars, including Lady Gaga and Billie Eilish. The abundance, the variation, the extravagance, the artifice that the weave ushered in three decades ago now benefits allpeople, not just Black women.

That said, is the weave’s reign nearing its end? Among Black people, there’s an ongoing argument that it may have been eclipsed by the lace-front wig. Lace fronts, as they’re known, are those in which strands of human hair are applied to a thin piece of lace that imitates the skin on the forehead and scalp. Many seem completely natural — consider the updos, inspired by classic ’90s weaves, that Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B wore to promote last year’s “WAP.” Such looks feel nostalgic, but they’re also novel, like something the stars of the 1995 movie “Clueless” would wear if it had been set in Harlem instead of Beverly Hills. And unlike their predecessors, the women who wear them get to have it both ways: They can pair Chanel with Reeboks or a Louis Vuitton handbag with a black wig long enough to graze the backs of their knees, as Megan Thee Stallion recently did. In that way, the Black artist has yet again evolved: Unlike Houston or even Lil’ Kim, she is her own brand, fully in command of her own aesthetic. She doesn’t need the weave to give her a sense of independence — she already has it.

Then there’s the natural hair renaissance, which took hold around 2008 as many women decided to forgo harsh relaxers. Hair-care videos began proliferating online, but some of their fans soon found their natural hair too difficult or time-consuming to maintain and found themselves turning to ... the weave. Many women now get extensions from time to time to protect their hair from excess manipulation — or simply to try on a new identity. Braided neatly, hair can be moisturized and conditioned while hidden beneath a weave, allowing the extensions to be blow-dried, curled, straightened or trimmed into any style its wearer likes.

But do these shifts mean the weave is over, or just that the Black woman now has options, and the right to employ as many of them as she pleases? Her hair is her own to do with it as she likes, and so is the rest of her. While society has yet to imagine a Black woman full of possibility, it’s a reality she has envisioned for herself. It’s hers, however she expresses it — and no one can take it away from her.

READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES HERE