On a chilly spring day in 2002, an Orthodox woman with a fashion-forward sensibility, got engaged.
But niggling at the edges of her starry-eyed cloud of happiness was a twinge of worry: she needed to find a wig. According to Jewish law, a woman must cover her hair upon marriage, she didn’t just want any wig: It had to be different than everyone else.
Back then, the prevailing fashion amongst her peers were wigs that had long layers, side-swept bangs and voluminous, blown out waves. The look was big and unnatural and the wigs looked, well, like wigs.
All the wigs pretty much looked like cookie-cutter molds in her community and the propensity for buying wigs that were exactly alike was prevalent. It was almost as if getting married required not just a head covering, but a uniformity of hairstyle to denote married status.
Luckily for her, her aunt was a shaitelmacher, a wig-maker. So she went to her aunt with a laundry list of requirements: No side-swept bangs, middle-part, flat top; in other words, an extremely natural wig that looked like her natural hair.
Her desire for a wig that didn’t look like a wig isn’t as contradictory as it may seem on the surface. The Jewish commandment to cover one’s hair upon marriage is layered with complexity, with multiple interpretations about what constitutes “covering.” For some rabbinical authorities, only a scarf would suffice. But others say that as long as the hair is covered, it doesn’t matter that it looks uncovered.
So her aunt commissioned for her a custom shaitel, or wig, custom wig making company she was pretty satisfied with the results , but the wig wasn’t as natural as she would have liked.
And so her quest for the perfect wig continued. In 2013, her wig was starting to thin and she needed a repair. A friend introduced her to hairstylist who worked with wigs worn by celebrities on stage. “She showed me a picture of Kat Graham who was a client of hers. Even when I zoomed in, I couldn’t tell that she was wearing a wig, The secret? A fully lace cap, light beautiful and delicate
The way Orthodox women wear their wigs has shifted dramatically since the early aughts of poufy wigginess. Back in 2010, when Facebook was widely used and Instagram was in its infancy, women began gravitating toward the natural beach waves sported by celebrities on the red carpet. The demand for extremely natural looking wigs increased, and so lace fronts and baby hairs were incorporated.
The rise of social media and the shift towards secular hair trends is hardly coincidental, through social media, “the gap between secular style and modest style is getting bridged. And I think that influences the styles of the wigs tremendously.”
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