(upbeat electronic music)
I'm Chris, I'm a Visual Anthropologist here at Cut,
and I'm the series editor for 100 Years of Beauty.
We definitely have wanted to do
a lot more series with men.
We've explored hegemonic male beauty in the first video,
but the entire time that 100 years was happening,
there was a complete other, but parallel,
beauty tradition for black men.
So we found Lester.
Not only is he incredibly handsome,
but he's also just a sweet, nice guy who's
an incredible musician.
He's a father.
I think we all learned a lot about
how precise and scientific you can actually be
to execute some of these hairstyles.
In the 1910s, the image we chose
is a portrait of a young couple in 1912.
We got this image from Duke University's archives.
In the early 20th century, actually,
most people wouldn't be caught dead
leaving the house without a hat on, right?
So this is part of being in civil society
is having a hat in public.
In the 1920s, we modeled Lester after William J. Powell, Jr.
William Powell is a pioneer in aviation, but not just that,
he was also a civil rights activist who was really outspoken
about Jim Crow segregation in the South.
The 1930s, we modeled this look
after Donald Sheffield Ferguson.
He's got this very strong part.
Donald Sheffield Ferguson is actually
the first black medical student at Kansas University,
and he fought tooth and nail
to even get in the program and to stay.
It was really difficult for him.
To see, in the '30s, even before
what we think of as Civil Rights Movement
and the desegregation of public schools,
we have black folks who were actually working really hard
to achieve advanced medical degrees.
In Black History Month especially,
it's important to recognize just how many black men
served in World War II.
In particular, the Tuskegee Airmen,
a pretty elite group of fighter pilots
that served since World War I and onward.
We wanted to recognize that here with this look.
Of course, black music is part
of the fabric of American culture.
We modeled him after Little Richard,
who has the conk hairstyle.
The conk is kind of...
It's like, chemically processed, so we didn't actually
formally do that to Lester,
but we tried to reproduce it here in this studio.
In the autobiography of Malcolm X,
there's actually a chapter dedicated
to when he gets his first conk.
He writes about how much he wanted to be white
and to have white hair and adopt a white sort of physiology.
And yet, the pain was so unbearable, during the process
that it kind of inaugurated, for him,
a kind of racial consciousness
about a colonial mentality, about wanting to be white,
about being a black body in a white world.
One thing we wanted to be really clear about
in this video is that hair and politics
are always intertwined, so in the '60s,
our inspiration was a very iconic image of Huey Newton.
He was the, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party.
The black beret is part of a global revolutionary tradition.
It's a global signifier of a revolutionary call to action.
It's pretty amazing what we see in just half a century,
that black men are disciplined
into not having any hair at all,
in fact, even covering it or chemically processing it.
To pick out your Afro, and wear it so proudly,
completely resists those sorts of forms of discipline
that have been on black bodies.
The '80s look that we chose is of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
He is an artist that is from New York.
He was actually a black nationalist, too.
So he was, he actually...
you know, in...
in poetics, had a lot to say about anti-colonization,
about the liberation of black people.
One thing this video can do is show
a kind of history of the present.
And when we seen The Weeknd performing
with his crazy hair, we see in his look, in the present,
a little bit of Basquiat's essence.
For the '90s, we included a flattop.
You might remember the flattop on Will Smith
in Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
The Fresh Price of Bel Air is actually
an interesting symbol,
because we have, in the case of Will Smith's character,
this person trying to mediate middle-class existence
coming from the inner city.
You cannot look at Fresh Prince of Bel Air
without thinking in the background about Rodney King
and the LAPD incident, about race riots,
about urban blight, about kinds of violence
that are happening to black bodies in US cities.
For the 2000s, we actually used Lester's own pictures
for the reference.
He had these really big, beautiful braids tied back.
And the facial hair, actually, is pretty typical
of that time, I would say,
especially if you look at R&B celebrities or rappers.
In the 2010s look, we have this sort of
throwback reference
to the flattop, right,
but it's really in the fade and the verticality.
Yet, we also see plenty of white boys walking around
with this kind of thing, with a fade.
Macklemore, maybe famously, has this haircut, too.
So, I just think it's interesting.
In a century, you have white men going into
black-owned barbershops to get their hair done
because it's part of a longer Southern tradition.
One thing I think 100 Years of Beauty
has always tried to do is show
how the past continues to inform the present.
And there are things in history that we can't exactly
express with words, but we can show with images.