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Russian Boys' Hair Styles s Russian boys hair styles
Russian Boys' Hair Styles
Figure 1.--This 1911 cabinent card shows three children, presumably siblings. Two have very clsely cropped hair and the other curls. At first glance we thought the younger child with the curls was a girl. But based upon the blouse abd bowtie, it may be a boy. We are not certain. The cropped hair may be associated with school. The dealer thought the portrait may be Swedish. The Cyrilic script and the fact the city was Molilew on the Dineper suggest Russia to us. Perhapds reades may have some insights. Click on the image to see the back of the card and the notr written there.
We have noted Russian boys wearing a range of hair styles. We have noted many boys with cropped hair in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We do not fully understand children' hair styling convention in Russia, especially during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some boys had extremrly cloesd cropped hair. This includes both younger children and school age boys. We even note girls with cropped hair which was somewhat unusual in Europe. Cropped hair seems to have still been common after the Revolution, but after World War II became much less common. We note many other styles suchbas bangs. Some younger boys from well to do families had long hair. Hopefully Russian readers will provide some insights as to hair styling trends.
Bangs
We have noted younger Russian boys wearing bangs, but do not have sufficent information at this time to assess how common this was.
We note many Russian boys with cropped hair heads in the late 19th and 20th century. Some of the images seem to show shaved heads, but we think for the most part that the children's hair was cropped and not shaved. Cropped hair seems paruicularly common with school-age boys. It probably as in Germany and other European countries primarily a sanitary measure at school. We notice that in the early 20th century before World War I, this style was especially prominent. Many Russian boys even quite young boys had cropped hair.
In this respect the Russians were similar to the Germans. I'm not sure to what extent this was a style popular with the parents or enforced by the schools. We also do not know what the children themselves thought of it. Not all boys had cropped heads, but it was certainly very common. HBC at this time is unsure as to why shaved heads were such a popular style. We thouht at first it may have been a school rule, but we have noted images of even young pre-school children with shaved heads. One image even seems to show a girl with a shaved head, but this was not common. Sanitation was one reason that children's hair was sometimes shaved. With the Russians, however, ot seems to be more a style than a sanitation measure. We notice many cabinent photos of prosperous families where the children's hair is cropped, including very young pre-school children. After World War I and the Russian Revolution, these shaved ahir styles did not disappear, but became gradually less common. We rarely after World War II see images of Young Pioneers, for example, with shaved heads.
We have noted some younger Russian boys with hair over their ears, even during the Sovie era. Andrea Sakarov as a bow of about 7 or 8 years wore sailor suits and long hair over his ears. I am not sure how common this was. Most boys had short hair through the 1960s The Soviet Union was affected by Western fashions long before Western politcal and economic thought was successful. First it was jeans in the 1960s. Next long hair styles became popular in the 1970s. I have few details, but assume that Soviet school administrators had the same difficulty over hair length that administrators in America had in the 1960s and 70s. The boys apparently won the contest of wills and longer hair styles were actually being shown in Soviet movies by 1979--presumably meaning that longer hair was being accepted in the schools. Soviet boys even in the 1970s, however, rarely wore shoulder-length hair. We have few detaild but do not beliece that this was tolerated by school authorities.
Short Hair
School age boys generally had short hair. Many boys had close cropped hair, but there were also many short styles that were long enough to comb. The actual length and styles varied over time. Here some schools may have imposed rules about hair length, but we have few details. Short hair cuts for boys continued through the 1960s.
