GREEN WIGS.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 85, 16 May 1914, Page 4

GREEN WIGS.

COLOURED HAIR CRAZE IN PARIS.

I went to a coloured wig ball the other night, and saw how this extraordinary craze had descended from the higher and more exclusive society to the middle classes, wrote Alphonse Courtander, the Paris correspondent of the '' Express." There w r ere no leaders of society at this ball that was held in* a hall as large as Olympia:' there were young men, working probably as clerks during the daytime, who had acquired at much expense and time, a knowledge of the tango from the dancing academy in the Rue Caumartin; and young women who might have been also busily working in a day-world where green wigs are not worn. And there was an admixture of that Hash companionship, that '' society'' that is no society at all. I found it all. painfully dull \and amazingly stupid. There was no gaiety, and an air of frigid respectability brooded over the room. It seems to me that everyone was determined to prove that purple hair and propriety could go very well together, though I am certain that most of the women there thought that they were frightfuJlv 'bold and fashionable.

They danced the tango and the Brazilian maxixe, and now and again a onestep—but chiefly it was tango.

The faces of the men were all taut and strained with the effort of remembering the steps they had learned at so many francs an hour. ... I remember, vividly, a little Japanese, with flying coat-tails, going round and round with a very tall woman, whose bright blue hair completed a peculiarly atrabilious colour scheme. Ah! what letters must have been written to Tokio the next day! A Barbers' Boom. One looked down from the balcony, across the wide hall festooned and looped with coloured lamps, upon a chromatic picture of moving heads. A world gone mad, you say, or, rather, a half-world, where women, in their' revolt against nature, scorn to be merely brunette or blonde, but desire to be '' verte," '' pourpre," or " rose.'' They carried their wigs with the perfect assurance with which all women accept even the most extravagant of fashions. J have a shrewd idea that many of them were sent by the hairdressers themselves, who, of course, are

at the buck of the coloured hair movement. Waxen heads, dressed in baffling postiches of many colours, smiled their waxen smiles beneath glass cases in the foyer, advertising this or that hairdresser.

White or powdered hair is not outrageous; there is even something beautiful and stately about it. Perhaps it is because white hair is not anti-nature: but these wigs of extraordinary colours, of shades of pale green and rich sky-blue, seem to be monstrosities born of an unhealthy imagination. . . . They are fashionable, that is all, and if fashion declared that red noses were to be worn, with blue painted ears, there would be an immediate rush to the paint-pot. Tango and Blue Hair! It made one sigh for the ''wide, windy corner of a high, distant hill," where all such follies would be swept away. If it were but a passing joke, there might be something understandable about this lust for "multi-coloured hair; but these people too themselves utterly seriously. It never occurred to them that there was any reason why your hair should not be green or purple if it suits you that it should be. Nor, indeed, is there any reason, except that, if it were naturally green, the hairdressers would immediately start a fashion of black and brown hair. Dreary Dulness. So tbey capered, doing their tango steps, picking up their feet uncertainly

to and fro round about, sitting down at the tables afterwards to sip champagne and nibble a sandwich. The stranger, new to Paris, would probably have imagined that he Avas seeing something desperately Parisian, but there is more lighthearted, spontaneous fun to be seen at any of the new night clubs in London.

Frankly, I was disappointed. It was -as dull and as uninspiring as a shilling "hop" in the Holborn Hall; the only bright thing about it was the hair. Its brightness was overwhelming; there were all imaginable shades of red, from rich vermilion to pale, pale rose; greens and-brilliant yellows, indigoes and Prussian blues, and blues as faint as a morning sky, bright, glittering hair, literally golden, hard enough to the eye to make a poet forsake his simile for ever —they wove themselves into a dazzling pattern, a crazy-quilt of coloured wigs. You only looked at the heads: a splash of green above a pale face magnetised the vision—as they walked round the room, you did not look at eyes or lips, you looked upwards to the mound\ qf purple or scarlet that piled up above the forehead.

I fancy that this coloured wig craze is destined to die in the agony of its own hideousness. ■ No hairdresser's window, even in the minor streets, is complete without one grinning face capped with a head of hair of any colour except a human one. It has become vulgarised, and when Everybody does it, then Somebody ceases to do it. Anyhow, in ease the eager dance committees of our London suburbia are thinking of coloured wigs as something terribly smart and exclusive, let me assure them, with my hand on my heart, that it is incredibly silly and vulgar.