The simple wildflower-print dresses worn by the ladies of the Texas polygamist cult (hasn’t anybody discovered their real name, or at least created a media moniker?) may indicate innocence, submission, and lack of vanity, but their updos stand for anything but. Cosmetics are apparently forbidden, but hair products can get you closer to salvation. God likes Extra Hold.
These hairdos are at once stern, righteous, forbidding, and deliberate. They stand in contrast to the iconic hair of other rural women in, say, the American South – where most any Sunday morning service will find once fashion-forward hairstyles, on certain individuals mutating with every pass of the poison crop-duster into more and more elaborate parodies of the original. (Maybe pesticides gradually cloud up the mirrors around town.) Said permutations are not, in other words, necessarily deliberate.
The polygamists’ updos, however, seem somehow more, well, pointed. Since their lives are centered mainly around each other (at least that’s how it is on HBO’s Big Love), for whom exactly are these high and mighty hair messages meant? I think they’re meant for each other. It’s easy to imagine hair-height and projection of the unicorn-curl signifying some kind of station among the gals. Since male attention is coveted, one must assume that wave-width engineering has something to do with that.
I’d be a lesbian polygamist and smuggle contraband around in mine. Murine for the alpha sister‘s coffee, perhaps, when Mr. Big Breeches‘ evening visitation schedule doesn’t suit. Or flammable cans of travel-sized hairspray for those tricky days. Condoms ordered online, fluttering into the soup tureen. Definitely condoms.
This article appears in May 23 • 2008.