The Birth of the Bouffant

The bouffant coif supposedly gained popularity thanks to Marie Antoinette whose coiffeur sought to camouflage her early balding by upsweeping her thin tresses atop her head to cascade over her ears. The style lost its popularity after the overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty and the Queen's decapitation by the guillotine, however Jackie Kennedy, JFK's fashionable wife, reincarnated the fashion with the help of her hayrides Mr. Kenneth.

Everything Jackie was fabulous in the early 60s and women across America sought to imitate the First Lady's glamour with a visit to the local hair salon whether they lived in New York or Iowa. The country was awash with bouffants. Movie stars such as Audrey Hepburn and Kim Novak furthered the cause of the extreme hair-do. Only the nuns at Our Lady of the Foothills rejected the trend. They cropped their hair to the skull, but none of their students ever saw what was under the dimple, so they could have been sporting bouffants too.

The bouffant died out with the coming of the hippie era. Women wore their hair long and the the style seemed slated for extinction. It has staged several rebirths. One with the lead singers of the B-52s and another with the English singer Amy Winehouse and the TV Show MADMEN.

Several weeks ago a woman walked into a New york bar. Her bleached blonde hair was piled high on her head. She looked so very 60s. I was sitting with Jamie Parker, recently back from Thailand and the 50 year-old ex-con said, "She looks like a 1960s transvestite."

"You don't like the bouffant?" The hair style brought me back to my youth and my first yearnings for women instead of girls.

"Not at all, this Mr. Kenneth who re-invented the hair style for Jackie Kennedy was gay." Jamie smirked at the passing beauty. She must have been a model. Her stiletto heels were almost as tall as her hair. The scent of her skin smelled of Chanel No.5.

"You have something against gays?" Back in the 60s they were called homos. People to be feared by young men, unless they were looking for a good time. Pedophile priests were another story altogether with their secret sacrament.

"Me, I love gays, but I looked at the bouffant hair style as a strategy gay hairdressers to make straight men not want to have sex with their wives or girlfriends. It even turned Kim Novak and Leslie Gore gay." Jamie spoke with no trace of rancor. His first love was drugs. Even back in the 60s.

"I liked the bouffant." I met a girl from Mattapan at the Oriental Theater. Her name was Jo with dirty blonde hair as stiff as a store mannequin's wig. She was my Kim Novak.

"Figures."

"How does it figure?"

"You're from Boston. Men from Boston love Jackie Kennedy. You probably went to bed jerking off to her."

"Not that I can remember." Jackie O was above my class. She rode horses and spoke French. Women like her were destined to marry rich regardless of their hairstyle. "I know my place."

"Don't we all." Jamie was only in the States to visit his mother. She lived in the Bronx. She thought that he was teaching school in Thailand. His real job was running the Pigpen A Go-Go. Fat pretty bar girls and skinny ugly pole dancers. A man of the street no matter where he lived on this Earth.

"Easy to know your place when it's only us and them." The them was the rich. The US was the rest of the world. No bouffant would make any of us a queen, except in Thailand, where the boys are girls and twice the girl any woman would be, even with a bouffant. Jackie O would love them.