Big Hair, Tiny Homes
We all know that fashion is cyclical—what goes around comes around. Sometimes trends even return after hundreds of years. In the 1770s, women (and men*) wore towering hair styles topped with small worlds, a fact which satirists exaggerated with relish: feathers, fruits, animals, and even architectural features like buildings and ships** came together to create miniature seascapes and landscapes. In the 2010s, the tiny spaces are back, except now we are living in them.
These tall hairstyles—which really were only a trend during the 1770s and early 80s, but which have become a synecdoche for the entirety of 18th century fashion—are now iconic, a symbol of all the decadence of the past, an epoch we have left far behind us in the 21st century. Yet, as I’d like to suggest, the decadence of the 1770s is not so alien to our world. In fact, our current obsession over the last five years with minimalism, Marie Kondo, and tiny homes is the next phase in its development. Our minimalism is the Neo-Rococo, the New Dandyism.
Minimalism, maximalism. When you think about it, they are not all that different. Or at least that’s what the eighteenth century recognized, even though they didn’t have either of those words. For them, portability was a luxury, efficiency a privilege. And it was also what was cutting-edge, a sign of progress, discovery, prosperity. The expansion of trade and exploration, a more sophisticated insurance industry, better transportation (even just within England, travel between towns increased by more than 200% from around 1705-1726) connected more parts of the globe. Robert Hooke’s invention of the microscope in the late 17th century also uncovered new diminutive dominions in the natural world. One would think this greater awareness and access to other scales of the world picture—microscopic and global—would make the world feel bigger, and it did. But at the same time, it made the world feel smaller and more within grasp.
Jonathan Swift captured this paradox—that tininess could be a form of grandeur and power—in his satire Gulliver’s Travels (1726), when Gulliver is explaining to the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent talking horses, what life is like as a Yahoo (read: human): “[T]his whole globe of earth must be at least three times gone round before one of our better female Yahoos could get her breakfast, or a cup to put it in.” Swift may have had his friends in mind when he wrote this, as Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope use similar formulations. In one of his essays for the widely read periodical The Spectator, Addison writes:
“The single Dress of a Woman of Quality is often the Product of a hundred Climates. The Muff and the Fan come together from the different Ends of the Earth. The Scarf is sent from the Torrid Zone, and the Tippet from beneath the Pole. The Brocade Petticoat rises out of the Mines of Peru, and the Diamond Necklace out of the Bowels of Indostan.”
Spectator No. 69, 1711
And in The Rape of the Lock (1712), Pope depicts a fashionable young woman of the beau monde at her morning beauty ritual:
The various off’rings of the world appear;
From each she nicely culls with curious toil,
And decks the goddess with the glitt’ring spoil.
This casket India's glowing gems unlocks,
And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.
The tortoise here and elephant unite,
Transform’d to combs, the speckled and the white.
from Canto 1
Each of these descriptions draws attention to the same incongruity, to how remarkable it is that an ordinary activity like eating breakfast, choosing an outfit, or preparing for the day is of epic proportion. The world can be contained in a teacup. It’s appropriate that Belinda, the poem’s protagonist, is figured as a “goddess.” To have the world, the whole of creation, at our disposal without hardly lifting a finger is to be as like God as it is possible to be. And of course, such a godlike power often went to people’s heads, resulting in the atrocities of imperialism and the global slave trade.
Imagine, then, what they would have said about the iPhone, a device that fits in the palm of your hand and can order dinner with the tap of a button, contact a friend on the other side of the world, and access a whole library of books and music all in a matter of minutes. There’s probably more storage space in a phone than there was in Europe’s greatest palaces. For a culture in which miniature portraits were a luxury (the 18th century was the “Golden Age” of miniatures) and in which the London elite considered it fashionable to serve milk fresh imported from the countryside twenty miles away—the miniaturization, the compactness of the world in the 21st century would have been beyond belief.
Yet, it seems that the rage for minimalism is so strong today because, as The New York Times’s 2016 article “The Oppressive Gospel of Minimalism” points out, it was supposed to be
a cure-all for a certain sense of capitalist overindulgence. Maybe we have a hangover from pre-recession excess — McMansions, S.U.V.s, neon cocktails, fusion cuisine — and minimalism is the salutary tonic. Or perhaps it’s a method of coping with recession-induced austerity, a collective spiritual and cultural cleanse because we’ve been forced to consume less anyway.
Minimalism as we’ve been practicing and dreaming about for the last decade is only possible out of a superabundance. For every newly KonMari-ed space, there are at least a dozen bags of trash at the curb. In fact, in the wake of Kondo’s show on Netflix at the beginning of this year, Goodwills and thrift stores around the country were overflowing with people’s castoffs. And Netflix’s other popular lifestyle show “Tiny House Nation” dramatizes the Herculean efforts it takes for people to downsize, or as they say, “go tiny.” There’s something elaborate—practically baroque—in the planning, the effort, and the contortions required to achieve that clean, white-walled living space or the perfect capsule wardrobe.
As the minimalism fad has reached its apex, the movement has naturally found other critics who’ve begun to see the minimalist paradox more clearly. National Review published an article in 2017 on how tiny homes were being deemed “Poverty Appropriation,” as if we are reliving a version of Marie Antoinette building a cottage on the grounds of Versailles so that she and her aristocratic friends could escape the burden of being rich and frolic in a bucolic paradise. The Guardian agreed, writing that minimalism is just another commodity to be consumed by the wealthy, and Anna North wrote a piece called “When It’s Cool to Have Nothing” for the NYT blog. What all of these critics have observed is something the 18th century saw first and that we would do well to remember: if we’re going to carry the world in our pockets, or on our heads, we must not bear the burden lightly.
*It is a common misconception that women wore wigs during this period. In fact, women used their own hair (with the aid of hair extensions, hair products, pins, rollers, and forms) to create these elaborate styles. Men also participated in the big hair trend. They were the ones wearing the wigs.
**The ship-bedecked hair style, called à la Belle Poule, much beloved by historical costumers was, in reality, a discrete historical moment in France in 1778 celebrating the naval victory of a French frigate, Belle Poule, over an English ship during the battle that marked the beginning of French involvement in the War of American Independence.
