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Books > History > American history
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Love Entwined - The Curious History of Hairwork in America (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,486
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Love Entwined - The Curious History of Hairwork in America (Hardcover)
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In the largely forgotten craft of hairwork, practiced widely in
nineteenth-century America, the hair of loved ones-living and
deceased-was woven into jewelry, wall decorations, and keepsakes.
Rings, bracelets, lockets, and brooches were set with metalwork or
ivory and painted with rich patterns. Pocket watches hung from
long, woven hair fobs. Parlor walls were decorated with elaborate
wreaths made of hair fashioned into twigs and flowers, often
adorned with beads or ribbons. More unusual items even included a
tea set made entirely out of hair. Victorian men and women
treasured hairwork not only as remembrances of loved ones and
memorials of relationships but also as objects of beauty and means
of personal expression. Beginning as a trade of highly skilled
craftsmen in the late eighteenth century, hairwork became
tremendously popular among the middle class, and supported at its
peak in the mid-nineteenth century an industry that included
catalog dealers of premade pieces, standardized patterns, and
how-to books for hobbyists. Advertisements, stories, and
illustrations in popular publications depicted hairwork as the
height of sentimental fashion. Using a wide array of evidence drawn
from poetry, fiction, diaries, letters, and, above all, examples of
hairwork, Love Entwined traces the widespread and long-lived
popularity of the craft and its place in the American marketplace.
During a period that saw a growing mechanization of production
methods, hairwork stood apart not only for being made by hand but
also for using a part of the body as a material. Helen Sheumaker
argues that this refiguration of a loved one's hair into a
commodity created a unique meeting point between sentimentality and
consumerism, intensifying the close relationship between the goods
one purchased and the kind of person one wished to be.
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