The Lunatic Fringe
From Mabel Grey To Modern Day… Oh The Moral Perils of Forehead Visibility!
“Of all the positively ugly modes now current, the mode of wearing the hair ‘banged’, or combed down over the brow and cut square is perhaps the ugliest. It had its origins, if we mistake not, in the demimonde of Paris, where so many fashions rise.”
Whether they liked it or not, in the 1870s the British public could scarcely purchase a calling card without also purchasing the face of Mabel Grey. She and her deliciously scandalous micro-bangs stared out from many a shop window. Meanwhile, her likeness circulated society in the form of cartes de visite; pocket-sized idols of celebrity worship (collected with a fervour similar to how my primary-school-self collected go-go crazy bones, or your cousin collected pokemon during the covid pandemic)
Mabel’s face was notorious, and so was her fringe! A blunt, uncompromising strip of hair laid across her brow like a drawn curtain. Victorian journalists, who never met anything they could not morally indict, christened it the lunatic fringe (and lunacy allegations packed a punch in the era of lobotomies). The phrase carried the delicate implication that only a woman untroubled by propriety would consent to amputate her forehead in so decisive a fashion.
In mainstream fashions, the respectable fringe of earlier decades had been coaxed into curls, little ringlets denoting innocence and maternal suitability. Mabel’s version was, by comparison, geometric, and frighteningly reminiscent of the fringe I donned to techno events in Copenhagen circa 2021 after one too many drunken encounters with my kitchen scissors.
Contemporary commentators insisted Mabel’s style had slithered in from the Parisian demimonde, that reliable swamp from which all alarming novelties were said to crawl. Indeed, to resemble this courtesan, even by coincidence of hair, risked social contamination. Employement adverts stated that servants possessing such styles ‘need not apply’, whilst a gentleman named John Graham, seized by moral zeal in 1878, was said to forcibly shear his maid’s fringe off her head. Assault was apparently preferable to mico-bangs. IDK but John sounds more like the lunatic to me (also like the enactor of a celebrity’s IG comment section)
AND YET, despite the haters, the style has persisted, died a death, and been reborn several times to give us the sexilicous microbangs we know and love today, over a century on. Thank the goddess for fashion historians! Discovering and declaring revolutions in hemlines and corsets (have you heard the mini-skirt is a recession indicator?). Thank you to whoever is responsible for bringing this golden morsel forth into my weird little corner of the internet!
Go Forth and spread this useless the knowledge with those who must know! March to your local lesbian wine bar, scream it to your local goth, Whisper it into the ear of the intimidating fashionista on your morning commute…Go!
The Snake is Eating its Tail
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The Snake is Eating its Tail 〰️
