All the Shingle Ladies
- Virginia M. Wright
- May 8
- 2 min read
In 1924, Maine girls and women were flocking to hair salons to stay on top of the latest trend: the bob. A Freeport barber reported giving 10 bob haircuts a day. The Sun-Journal in Lewiston devoted an entire page to a discussion of bob styles, illustrated with sketches. And Portland barber William Souviny, who’d been catering to men for 25 years, replaced “four shearers in trousers” with “four curlers in skirts” and welcomed bob-seeking women into his shop. The bob was so popular that year — not just in Maine but across the country and in Europe too — that the question was not whether to get a bob, but rather, what kind of bob to get: a regular blunt chin-length bob or a “shingle.”
Just a few months earlier, bobs had been on the way out of style. But that changed when actress Louise Brooks paid a visit to New York hair dresser Saveli. “Saveli himself attended to my hair,” she later remembered. “He shortened my bangs to a line above my eyebrows, shaped the sides in points at my cheekbones, and shingled the back of my head.”
The shingle cut was dramatic. The back was shaved super short, tapering to a sharp V on the neck. The front gradually lengthened toward the cheekbones, swooping to narrow tips. Detractors called the style a “King Tut” and warned that girls with bobbed hair would “never win a national beauty contest.” The Portland Sunday Telegram pronounced the look “bizarre and therefore a huge success. And now college girls just simply can’t even pause to eat in their stampede to the beauty parlor in quest of the new shingle-bang. They just must have it. It’s the only way left to be ‘different.’”
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