False hair can reveal honest truths—about the past, gender, identity, and the stories men tell about themselves.
History has seen its share of famous toupees. John Wayne’s. Frank Sinatra’s. Humphrey Bogart’s. Hairpieces can reveal a wearer’s inner motivations, reinforce gender norms, cause embarrassment, and even provoke disgust. Although false, they can create real meaning.
In Wendy A. Woloson’s hands, the toupee helps us see how men have understood themselves and fashioned their identities over time. Starting in the late eighteenth century, when men stopped wearing white powdered wigs, and moving to the 1920s, when toupees could be easily mass-produced, Woloson tells the story of the “Toupee Age.” She investigates why balding was considered such a problem in the first place, how hair became entangled with anxieties about aging, and the ways that looking old posed a threat to manhood. She details the bear’s grease pomades, brush-on dyes, elixirs, false whiskers, and hairpieces that were created to meet shifting notions of masculinity and style. Under the Rug also introduces readers to the people who styled and traded hair, made wigs, and hawked baldness cures. Drawing on business records, advertisements, graphic images, and a host of other primary sources, Woloson incisively explains how such trades seeded fears about thinning hair and sold men solutions. This vanity project continues today, as hair transplants, medications to stimulate hair growth, and Toupee TikTok encourage people to reinvent the way they’re seen—by others and themselves.