Article: Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self.

In Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self, Canadian ethnographer Grant McCracken seeks to establish himself as the Rem Koolhaas of coiffure. Hairstyles, he argues, represent a great deal more than protective covering for the cranium; they are designed and engineered like buildings. More significantly, for women they are the very vocabulary of self-invention, the outward manifestation of an inner metamorphosis. To read Big Hair is to plunge into a rat's nest of cultural signifiers, to look long and hard at the ravages of peroxide, excessive teasing, and hair spray: to probe that delicate bond between female client and hairdresser - or, as McCracken would have it, ...

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