‘Ha, ha, ha,’ said my husband, as though he had learnt to laugh by reading Twitter. ‘Now they’ve got falsies.’
He was waving an article about clip-on man buns. A man bun is that top-knot that some young men began to sport, in proof that there is nothing too absurd for fashion. Now, it seems, false ones are on sale. The colours specified are black, brown and blond, which hardly promises a convincing match.
This development reminds me of the chignon, a hump of hair worn over a pad, fashionable at a century’s interval in the 1770s and 1870s. Trollope quickly took against it. In He Knew He Was Right (1869), he wrote of Miss Stanbury, one of those no-nonsense women he enjoyed creating: ‘A chignon, a bandbox behind the noddle, she would not endure.’ The expectation was that the chignon would be of false hair.
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