When did women start wearing their hair cut short? You might think the style dates back about a hundred years to the rise of the flapper, but it is actually quite a bit older, before the days of motion pictures or even photographic evidence. Specifically, back to the French Revolution. And even then, fashion trends followed pop culture entertainment.
During the later years of the French Revolution, many fashionable young men and women of the upper and middle classes began to cut their hair short. It was called the Titus haircut, or coiffure à la Titus. The name is a reference to Titus Junius Brutus, the elder son of Lucius Junius Brutus, who founded the Roman Republic in 509 BC by famously overthrowing the Roman monarchy.
The unlikely connection between an ancient Roman nobleman and a late-18th-century French haircut begins in 1729, with the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire, who had just finished composing a five-act play called Brutus. The play draws material from the legendary story of Lucius Junius Brutus, who condemned his son Titus to death for taking part in a conspiracy to reinstate the monarchy and put the overthrown king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus back on the throne. Titus was blindly in love with the Etruscan king’s daughter Tullie, and it was through this relationship that the conspirators dragged Titus into betraying Rome. When the Senate handed Titus over to his father, Brutus forgave his son but insisted on his execution to ensure the safety of the Republic.
What does any of this have to do with short hair? The actor who portrayed Titus during a 1791 revival of the play had his hair cropped short. Read how that became a viral fashion and what it meant to the French at Amusing Planet.
