Style capital, United States
New Orleans
Where a 1786 law forced women of colour to cover their hair, and they turned the tignon into a statement of style.
New Orleans, founded by the French in 1718 and under Spanish rule from the 1760s until 1803, had a large community of free people of colour. In 1786 the Spanish governor Esteban Miró ordered free women of colour to wear their hair covered with a head wrap, the tignon, to mark them apart from white women. The women wore it in fine fabrics and bold styles, and the tignon became a symbol of beauty and defiance.
The tignon law
Miró's order formed part of a decree on public order. Free women of colour in New Orleans were admired for their elaborate hairstyles, decorated with feathers and jewels, and the law aimed to restrain them and to show their place in the colonial order. They obeyed it on the surface but chose silks, madras and bright colours and tied the tignon high and ornate, often adding jewels, so that the covering drew more attention than the hair had.
The tignon today
The law faded after the Spanish period, but the tignon remained part of Creole dress into the 20th century and is still worn in New Orleans, at festivals, in church and by artists and performers who recall its history. It is related to the headwraps of West Africa and the Caribbean. The story is often told in discussions of laws on Black women's hair, from school rules to the CROWN Acts of recent years.
Hairstyles of New Orleans
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Tignon: François Fleischbein, Public domain, source
- Head tie: Dili Osuhor ( Teemages ), CC BY-SA 4.0, source