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 During
the Victorian period (1837-1901), European and North American societies
believed that a middle- or upper-class woman should function as manager
of both the house and family. The interior of the home subsequently
became a showcase for a woman’s best handwork and decorative taste.
The term "fancy work" came to describe both functional and
purely aesthetic objects a Victorian woman made or embellished in her
free time. From 1850 to 1875, one of the most popular forms of fancywork
was the hair wreath.
Appealing to the tendency among Victorian women to
incorporate the importance of friends and family into their work, hair
served as a tangible remembrance of someone. Often, close companions
exchanged hair as tokens of friendship. Hair was also sometimes taken
after a person’s death as a means of honor and remembrance. For a woman
whose local supply fell short, hair swatches could even be purchased
from catalogs and stores. Hair wreaths were constructed almost entirely
of human hair, which was manipulated to resemble a variety of flowers,
floral sprigs, and leaves. The flowers placed together in a horseshoe-shaped
wreath represent a common Victorian symbol for good luck displayed with
the open ends up so as to "hold the luck inside." 
This
large and densely packed hair wreath incorporates many of the numerous
techniques devised for the manipulation of hair. The digital photographs reveal, for example, the heavy use of a
gimping technique. First the hair was put into small groupings of between 10 and
80 hairs, twisted around a knitting needle, and then bound around the
bottom by fine intertwined wires.
An
interesting inclusion in this wreath is white horsehair, a substitute
that was sometimes incorporated when white human hair-the scarcest to
find-could not be obtained. Although
thicker, horsehair offered similar flexibility to human hair.
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