A Most Beguiling Accomplishment

It looks like I made a Twitter thread on this back in February of 2020, and while I always intended to turn it into a blog post, I suppose it's not surprising that I, er, forgot about it. But I've been thinking about the basic late Georgian hairstyle for a long time, ever since a long-ago Facebook thread on the subject. Most people were of the opinion that a bun would have been the default, but I'd been translating my fashion plates for quite a while by that point, and had noticed that the fashionable 1770s-1780s styles never incorporated a bun. Instead, they were mostly a mass of curls, and the part of the hair that was longer was simply pulled up the back of the head (sometimes braided, sometimes not) into what was referred to as a chignon . (Respectively, the plates can be found with their descriptions on this blog: here and here .) Obviously these hairstyles are exaggerated for the purpose of showing their details to the subscribers who wanted to imitate them, and then...