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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2iOCGYq:torrilin replied to your video “So, seeing all these things about Princess Leia iconography, here’s a…”
Usually when I’ve seen other long haired women do the double buns, it’s braided. Women with very curly hair sometimes do afro puffs too. I almost never see real squash blossom buns. Thank god.
Yeah, and Leia’s weren’t real squash blossom buns either, really– one of the salient features of the true squash blossom, as explained by the woman in the video, is that they have a kind of stem, and stand out from the head, because the hair tie is wound around them so many times. This means also that they don’t cover the ears.
I’ve seen, previously reblogged, a photo of the Mexican soldadera that Lucas saw and presumably drew his inspiration from– she was just one woman, who was wearing that hairstyle in just one surviving photo, so it was his error to think she was in any way representative. She must have either had some tie to the Hopi community, or have seen the hairstyle and admired it and copied it. Her version was more like what Leia wears, closer to her head, which makes me feel like she must have seen and copied the hairstyle rather than having had it taught to her. The idea of a long hair tie being the foundation of the squash blossom and tsiiyéé styles makes me feel like they’re sort of– co-evolved from a similar tradition, which the soldadera’s hairstyle, probably done instead with European pins, and Leia’s, absolutely done with European pins, don’t draw from.
Pin-based styles like that aren’t very durable, and loosely twisted hair definitely won’t stand up to any kind of wear and tear, which is why you can see Leia’s starting to come undone in some shots. For a pragmatic style, with flat textureless hair like mine, braids are absolutely the way to go– and in my case, I’ve found, oiled braids are the way to go, forget gel or any of that stuff. Even setting lotion does me no particular favors. But coconut and castor oil will make my hair flat and shiny and much more resistant to frizzing, so it can stand up to normal wear in a braided style.
I can’t do a twisted or loose style if my hair is oiled, because it’s too heavy and separates and clumps and doesn’t look right. But oiled braids, man. I’m a huge fan. Especially now that I’ve figured out that you can wrap the ends so they don’t fluff out.
I’ll have to look a bit more into it, but I know that this is historically how women of my ethnic background would do their hair. Pomade and other oil-based treatments were the traditional method of keeping long, flat European hair in good condition and biddable for hairstyles both simple and elaborate.
Listening to the video as the woman talks about the different styles of hair Hopi girls will wear at different stages of their development made me think about how very, very recently European-Americans lost those traditions themselves. My own mother grew up in a tradition where a girl’s hair was braided until puberty, and after that she cuts it shorter and begins to have it styled professionally; she rebelled, because it was the sixties, and wore her hair long and loose as an unmarried young woman, but that was when the tradition was lost. I reclaimed the braids myself, as a teenager, because I didn’t like the fashionable hairstyles of the 90s. (I had one experience with a perm. Those photos are not my favorites.)
We had these traditions, and we can reclaim them without appropriating from other traditional cultures, but it’s hard to pick out the traditions of your own people when they often weren’t recorded as such. Thinking of yourself as just “default” and “normal” means you don’t notice what you’re doing as much, you know? So it’s easier to appropriate something that was researched by someone who othered it at the time, and that’s just an alienating process all around.
Usually when I’ve seen other long haired women do the double buns, it’s braided. Women with very curly hair sometimes do afro puffs too. I almost never see real squash blossom buns. Thank god.
Yeah, and Leia’s weren’t real squash blossom buns either, really– one of the salient features of the true squash blossom, as explained by the woman in the video, is that they have a kind of stem, and stand out from the head, because the hair tie is wound around them so many times. This means also that they don’t cover the ears.
I’ve seen, previously reblogged, a photo of the Mexican soldadera that Lucas saw and presumably drew his inspiration from– she was just one woman, who was wearing that hairstyle in just one surviving photo, so it was his error to think she was in any way representative. She must have either had some tie to the Hopi community, or have seen the hairstyle and admired it and copied it. Her version was more like what Leia wears, closer to her head, which makes me feel like she must have seen and copied the hairstyle rather than having had it taught to her. The idea of a long hair tie being the foundation of the squash blossom and tsiiyéé styles makes me feel like they’re sort of– co-evolved from a similar tradition, which the soldadera’s hairstyle, probably done instead with European pins, and Leia’s, absolutely done with European pins, don’t draw from.
Pin-based styles like that aren’t very durable, and loosely twisted hair definitely won’t stand up to any kind of wear and tear, which is why you can see Leia’s starting to come undone in some shots. For a pragmatic style, with flat textureless hair like mine, braids are absolutely the way to go– and in my case, I’ve found, oiled braids are the way to go, forget gel or any of that stuff. Even setting lotion does me no particular favors. But coconut and castor oil will make my hair flat and shiny and much more resistant to frizzing, so it can stand up to normal wear in a braided style.
I can’t do a twisted or loose style if my hair is oiled, because it’s too heavy and separates and clumps and doesn’t look right. But oiled braids, man. I’m a huge fan. Especially now that I’ve figured out that you can wrap the ends so they don’t fluff out.
I’ll have to look a bit more into it, but I know that this is historically how women of my ethnic background would do their hair. Pomade and other oil-based treatments were the traditional method of keeping long, flat European hair in good condition and biddable for hairstyles both simple and elaborate.
Listening to the video as the woman talks about the different styles of hair Hopi girls will wear at different stages of their development made me think about how very, very recently European-Americans lost those traditions themselves. My own mother grew up in a tradition where a girl’s hair was braided until puberty, and after that she cuts it shorter and begins to have it styled professionally; she rebelled, because it was the sixties, and wore her hair long and loose as an unmarried young woman, but that was when the tradition was lost. I reclaimed the braids myself, as a teenager, because I didn’t like the fashionable hairstyles of the 90s. (I had one experience with a perm. Those photos are not my favorites.)
We had these traditions, and we can reclaim them without appropriating from other traditional cultures, but it’s hard to pick out the traditions of your own people when they often weren’t recorded as such. Thinking of yourself as just “default” and “normal” means you don’t notice what you’re doing as much, you know? So it’s easier to appropriate something that was researched by someone who othered it at the time, and that’s just an alienating process all around.
