By Nicole Caldwell for Stacker
Adolescence represents one of the most significant periods of self-identity. Famed developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson said the teenage years are specifically punctuated by that quest, which he described featuring “identity vs. role confusion.” No longer children but not quite adults, adolescents work through their personal goals, belief systems, and values while battling against their lack of autonomy. Without the ability to express themselves with careers, acquisitions, or other outlets, a vast majority of teenagers use exaggerated outward appearances that often subscribe to a particular stereotype to fit into a specific role.
High school students over the last century have divided themselves by visibly striking groups: the hippies, jocks, preppies, punks, emo kids, hipsters, and so forth. From fashion and musical tastes to hairstyles, teenagers wear their identities quite literally on their sleeves and heads. These trends reflect the cultural backdrops from which they grew: pixie cuts and fedoras during the Roaring Twenties; long hair and Afros during the ‘60s, and the big-hair trends of the ‘80s all typify the world in which these people lived; whether constrained and conservative (the ‘50s) or wild and subversive (the ‘70s).
In this way, it’s possible to chart American history by fashion trends and hairdos. Never ones to disappoint, the folks at The Pudding seized on this concept to use AI deep learning classification to analyze a dataset of more than 30,000 high school yearbook photos spanning 1930 to 2013 in a study called The Big Data of Big Hair, published in 2019. The study identified the median hair density for high school students in every year; median hair density is a measure of how far out a hairstyle extends from the bearer’s head. Here, Stacker has included the densities for the beginning, middle, and end of each decade in the study, separated into hairstyles associated with boys and those associated with girls.
The data is decidedly Anglocentric, which is representative of census data which shows the U.S. white population comprised more than 80% of the total population until 2000. As demographics in the U.S. have changed in the last few decades, we have seen more representative, mainstream hairstyles (and associated products) change, as well. It may take longer for schools to catch up to these changes: A New Jersey wrestler in 2019 was forced to cut his dreadlocks before a match; while hairstyles like braid extensions have been called out for violating dress codes.
Keep reading to see how big (and cropped) hairstyles accentuated the times from which they grew.
