Looking at examples of period dress
http://www.americanrevolution.org/clothing/clothing2.html
All the men have wigs.
How would a typical man come across in say, 1720 London, if he were appropriately dressed but just had a “modern” haircut? Not long. Like a vagrant?
It was always my impression that the wig was formal attire for a gentleman… i.e. not unlike someone wearing a suit in today’s social circles. (Of course, there was a lot more formality in those days - any social gathering of the upper class would be a dress-up afair.)
You have to remember that 90% of the population spent their time cleaning floors, digging rock out of mines, shoveling coal into furnaces, etc.
Would merely being on a London street with no wig seem weird? No, but the rest of your clothing might look weird.
If you were in a setting (formal event at a club, or a party, or possibly religious service) where all the men were wearing wigs, and you had none, I would wager you’d get kicked onto the street pretty quickly.
The cleanliness of your hair would probably attract more attention than anything concerning length or style (as long as it wasn’t dyed an unusual color.) Your clothing, especially anything of an uncommon color or design or that was made from synthetic materials, would attract far more attention.
Most had cropped heads under those wigs because of the alleged reasons for wearing wigs. To go out without a wig ( or the towel turban they sometimes wore in lieu ) would not have been considered odd. More like not wearing a jacket.
Some men though wore their natural hair in a queue, and some stuck to the cavalier long hair of the previous century, and some were naturally bald anyway, without the revolting look of heads shaven like convicts or lunaticks. They weren’t as hot on uniformity as the Victorians, and the Victorians weren’t one fifth as hot on uniformity as the early twentieth century or now.
Only rich, fashionable men wore wigs. Then as now, most people were not rich or fashionable, but most of them were not vagrants either.
Some who didn’t wear wigs, like George Washington, powdered their hair and styled it so they looked much like they wore a wig anyway. It was a fashion thing among the upper classes. The custom disappeared in France shortly after the revolution, when anything that made you look like an aristocrat could cost you your head. Americans and Europeans gradually abandoned the custom over the next few decades. Wars and revolutions be damned, France still set the fashion trends for Europe.
IIRC, dressing up as a rich man when you weren’t could also get you arrested, so going wigless might be the safer bet anyway.
Care to expand. This sounds really interesting.
I’d like a cite for this, as it sounds very suspect. It sounds more medieval than Georgian, when social advancement was happening all over the place.
See the Wikipedia article on sumptuary laws. Apparently in England, the laws were not often enforced. I seem to recall that Cecil had an article about such laws a few years ago, but I can’t find it now.
But you are looking at the royal court , the officers of the parliament.
, higher military officers (above sergeant or similar… captain of a larger ship.)
Of course it was wrong for the servant to wear a wig.
I note that in the article, they say that a wig could cost £30 in 1720 and this is about £300 today - I think they left off a nought and £30 then would be more like £3000 today.
I can’t remember where it was, but I recently read that one if the Hanoverian kings (George III?) was very interested in the idea of prescribing and proscribing dress on the basis of social rank but was frustrated by a lack of strict enforcement.
You were expected to ‘dress the part’. People who dressed below their rank were almost as unpopular as those who sought to dress above it, for how else were you to derive the signals that enabled you to treat them with the respect that their station in life required?