From the Victorian Parlor to the Red Carpet: The Strange History of Hair Art

A Hair-Raising Trend

Margot Robbie can dress the part. The actress has helped popularize a new kind of promotion, turning the press tour into a fashion show. Starting with Barbie, studios have embraced themed wardrobes as opportunities for buzz. Robbie made headlines again with Victorian-inspired looks for the newest adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Robbie alongside Jacob Elordi.

While Emerald Fennell’s film has already sparked a great deal of debate, one detail from the UK premiere left everyone shocked. Robbie wore a nude Dilara Findikoglu gown decorated with an unusual material: human hair. The choice caused a bit of an uproar online, but the Victorians would have found it perfectly ordinary. The same would likely not be said of the cut of her dress, which is rather daring by 19th-century standards!

When Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë was published in 1847, jewelry made from human hair was a common accessory. In fact, the author’s sister, fellow literary icon Charlotte Brontë, wore a bracelet made from the hair of Emily and their third sister, Anne. Robbie even wore a replica of this very bracelet to complete her look. The original survives today in the collection of the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

The Significance of Human Hair

To modern eyes, jewelry made from human hair can seem a little unsettling. But for centuries, it was a deeply sentimental material. Before the widespread use of photography, when commissioned portraits were reserved for the wealthy, a lock of hair was a long-lasting, physical connection to a loved one. The material is also wonderfully accessible. It grows for free!

Unlike most parts of the body, hair survives long after life has passed. A small braid or woven strand could preserve the memory of someone for generations. During the Stuart era of the 17th and early 18th centuries, mourning rings contained braided strands of hair sealed beneath a faceted rock crystal cover. The transparent crystal allowed the hair to remain visible while protecting it inside the jewel. But hairwork wasn’t always tied to death. Many early examples were irreplaceable tokens exchanged between the living.

One example appears in the early 17th century, when King Christian IV of Denmark gifted his queen, Anna Catherine of Brandenburg, a bracelet braided with his own hair. By offering a small piece of himself, the king offered nothing less than his very self to his bride. Romantic, no?

The Victorian Obsession

While hairwork can certainly be found earlier, the Victorians took it to a new level.

Queen Victoria was the defining figure of the era that bears her name. From white wedding dresses and serpent rings to Christmas trees, Victoria's personal choices became global trends, making her one of history's first influencers. In 1861, 24 years after she was crowned, her beloved husband, Prince Albert, died unexpectedly at the age of 42. The loss devastated the Queen. She entered a period of mourning that would last the rest of her life.

Victorian society treated grief as a visible ritual governed by strict etiquette with clear stages of dress. The first, known as deep mourning, required dull black fabrics such as crape or wool, with ornament. After a period of time, second mourning allowed for black silk and subtle decoration, including jet jewelry. Finally came half-mourning, when muted shades like gray, lilac and soft purple gradually returned to a wardrobe.

The length of mourning depended on the relationship to the deceased. For women, the expectations were especially strict. A widow mourning her husband was expected to remain in deep mourning for at least a year, often wearing a full black veil in public.

Queen Victoria’s mourning was much longer. After Albert’s death, she never wore bright colors again. For the remaining forty years of her life, she dressed almost exclusively in black. She also wore a small brooch containing a lock of Albert’s hair, which she kept close until her own death in 1901, and was buried with it.

As the tastemaker of the period, the Queen’s lifelong mourning had a powerful cultural effect. The 19th century already faced high mortality rates, and remembrance was an important part of everyday life. Post-mortem photography, elaborate funerary customs and memorial objects were widely embraced.

Within this world, hairwork flourished. Hair could be woven into rings, brooches, bracelets and lockets worn close to the body. It could also appear in framed works of art, such as intricate wreaths or family trees made from the hair of relatives. These objects were created to honor a loved one or celebrate family ties.

What is Hairwork, Anyways?

At its height in the 1800s, hair was woven into many elaborate and very beautiful things, and was popular in Europe as well as America. Let’s take a look.

There were four main types of hairwork: gimp work, table work, palette work and dissolved work.

Gimp Work

Gimp work used wire and a needle to secure hair into looped chains, which could be shaped into hair wreaths, bouquets and three-dimensional flowers, sometimes accented with beads or pearls. Gimp work was primarily decorative and was often displayed in the home beneath glass domes or within shadow boxes.

Historically, these works were more often associated with living individuals rather than memorial pieces. They symbolized family ties or the unity of a community. A hair “tree,” for instance, could be formed from many contributors, representing a family or a broader group such as a church congregation or town. Some surviving examples incorporate locks from hundreds of individuals, all carefully bound together. These works function as portraits, each participant donating a lock of hair to become part of the whole.

Table Work

Table work involved dividing hair into strands, attaching them to bobbins and weaving or braiding them on a weighted table to create patterns. This technique produced wearable items such as bracelets, necklaces, rings and hair chains, as well as some decorative objects. Table work allowed artisans to create intricate, repeating designs that were elegant and durable.

Charlotte Brontë’s bracelet, fashioned from her sisters’ hair, exemplifies tablework, and the technique was used to create intimate keepsakes. These, too, were associated with the living, used as tokens of romance, friendship and family.

Palette Work

Palette work took a more pictorial approach. Individual strands of hair were glued flat onto thin tissue, then cut and arranged to form images ranging from simple floral flourishes to detailed scenes. This technique was more often associated with funerary art or memento mori. Works could be framed or discreetly placed upon the reverse of mourning pendants or brooches, an intimate secret known only to the wearer.

At the Paris Exhibition of 1855, a full-length palette-work portrait of Queen Victoria was exhibited, demonstrating the extraordinary level of skill the technique could achieve.

Dissolved Work

Dissolved work uses hair as a pigment. Strands were finely chopped or ground and mixed with gum arabic to create a paint-like medium. This sepia-toned mixture was then used to paint delicate scenes, portraits or lettering, usually on small pieces of ivory.

The resulting miniature paintings were highly detailed and often associated with mourning. They appeared on objects such as jewelry, lockets and small boxes, sometimes found alongside palette work.

The Artists and Makers

The names of hairwork artists rarely survive. Most were created by women, both at home and professionally, making hair art a largely uncredited female artistic tradition. The craft was often passed down through families, with techniques learned from relatives or from one of the many Victorian manuals devoted to ladies’ “fancywork,” which presented hairwork alongside needlework, embroidery and wax flower making.

Instructional guides helped popularize the craft. Publications such as Self-Instructor in the Art of Hair Work (1867) by Mark Campbell and The Lock of Hair (1871) by Alexanna Speight offered detailed instructions for those wishing to create lasting mementos themselves.

While most examples were made at home, hairwork was also a thriving commercial trade. Professional studios in cities such as London and Paris accepted commissions, allowing clients to bring, or even mail, the hair of a relative to be fashioned into jewelry or memorial objects. Victorian magazines like Godey’s Lady’s Book even cautioned readers that less scrupulous makers might mix in other hair, or even add horsehair, to make the material easier to work. The scale of the industry was considerable; by the late 1850s, hundreds of thousands of pounds of hair were being imported into the United States for use in hairwork and related crafts.

The village of Våmhus in Sweden emerged as a thriving source of traveling hairworkers during the 19th century. Women from the village developed a traditional Scandinavian method of working with hair that more resembled the techniques of lace-making. This craft evolved naturally from an earlier local tradition: for generations, the women of Våmhus had traveled across Scandinavia and parts of Europe as makers and sellers of powdered wigs. With the growing demand for hair art, many adapted their trade, traveling as door-to-door saleswomen who offered their hairworking services in exchange for payment and board.

From the Victorian Parlor to the Red Carpet

By the early 20th century, hairwork had largely fallen out of fashion. The rise of photography offered a simpler way to preserve a loved one’s likeness, while funerary customs shifted from intimate home rituals to services conducted by professional funeral homes. Cultural changes also meant fewer hours were devoted to domestic handicrafts among wealthy women. Even recently, the Leila's Hair Museum, which was long believed to house the world’s largest collection of historic hairwork, closed its doors in September 2025.

But because hair is so undeniably personal, its use has never disappeared entirely. Early in his career, Alexander McQueen incorporated strands of human hair into the plastic garment tags attached to his clothing. Contemporary artists such as Mona Hatoum, Jessica Wohl, Alice Anderson and many more have explored hair as a material in their work.

These avant-garde works often engage with the concept of abjection, the uneasy psychological response to bodily materials the body casts off, which are considered inappropriate for public display and disrupt our sense of cleanliness. In today’s cultural context, loose hair is more likely to inspire recoiling disgust than sentimental feelings of love or friendship. Just ask any waiter dealing with a stray hair on a dinner plate.

Emerald Fennell plays with this tension in her adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Hair appears throughout the film, from the stop motion opening credits to a doll fashioned from stolen hair. These moments balance the historical intimacy of hairwork with the modern sense of horror.

Still, our cultural relationship with hair may be shifting once again. Traditional hairwork artists report that workshops and classes now sell out quickly, suggesting a renewed curiosity about the craft. In an era shaped by digital images and artificial intelligence, the appeal of something so human may be growing. Moments in contemporary fashion, such as Margot Robbie’s viral hair dress are bringing the conversation back into the public eye.

This Victorian parlor craft may yet find new life in the modern world.

Works Cited

Borden, Marsha. “Homegrown Thread: The Art of Human Hairwork in the Gilded Age.” PieceWork, July 26, 2023.

Burgess, Anika. “The Intricate Craft of Using Human Hair for Jewelry, Art, and Decoration.” Atlas Obscura, January 12, 2018.

Meier, Allison. “The Curious Victorian Tradition of Making Art from Human Hair.” Artsy, February 18, 2018.

Morgan, Kate. “The Very Old, Very Human Tradition of Making Art out of Hair.” The Washington Post, September 27, 2025.