A record sleeve, sequins, bell-bottom trousers and, on top, a perfectly round afro. The decade left us this postcard. It is misleading, and you will see why.
Understanding the 70s therefore means going back a little, and following what happens to a political sign when it becomes a fashion. It is first and foremost an American story, which arrived in France through music and cinema, and it did not produce the same effects on either side of the Atlantic. If you wear your natural kinky hair today, our step-by-step tutorial details the six steps of the Rituel Texture®.
What happened before the 70s
On January 28, 1962, in the basement of a Harlem jazz club, the Purple Manor, a collective of New York artists organized a fashion show with a straightforward title: Naturally '62, the Original African Coiffure and Fashion Extravaganza Designed to Restore Our Racial Pride and Standards. The collective was called the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios, founded in 1956; among its organizers were the photographer Kwame Brathwaite and his brother, the activist Elombe Brath. The models, gathered under the name Grandassa Models, were not professionals. They sewed their outfits and walked the runway with their unrelaxed hair.
In 1962, this was no given: it was the central act of the evening. There were, in fact, two shows instead of one, as the queue overflowed onto the sidewalk.
It was from this milieu that the “Black is Beautiful” slogan emerged, and we must consider what it reversed. Relaxing hair was not a whim but a professional and social convention, upheld by an entire industry. Showing up in public with your kinky hair meant declining a rule that everyone around you followed, and accepting the consequences both at work and at church.
The decade that followed therefore did not give birth to the afro. It amplified it, photographed it, and eventually sold it.
A hairstyle that cost something
On August 18, 1970, the FBI placed activist and academic Angela Davis on its list of the ten most wanted fugitives. Her portrait was plastered everywhere for two months, until her arrest in a New York hotel on October 13 of the same year. The image circulating then was not only that of a wanted woman: it was that of a silhouette, recognizable by her hairstyle even before being recognizable by her face.
Angela Davis revisited this episode much later, in a text published in 1994 by the journal Critical Inquiry. In it, she reports a rarely told consequence. Her portrait having served as a generic image, she writes, hundreds, perhaps thousands of Black women wearing their hair naturally were stopped, harassed or arrested during the two months she remained underground. A hairstyle had become a description.
In the same text, she expresses her annoyance at being reduced, a generation later, to this hairstyle rather than her struggle, and summarizes in one sentence what strikes her: bringing a liberation policy back to a fashion policy. This sentence is worth keeping in mind every time the decade is celebrated for its look alone.
What happened in those years was not a question of style. It was the right to show up in the world without correcting anything.
The decade when the afro becomes an aesthetic
Throughout the 70s, the hairstyle left the strictly militant field to settle into popular culture. Music carried it everywhere: the Jackson 5, Diana Ross, Earth, Wind & Fire, then the disco scene made it a familiar image, even for an audience that knew nothing of the debates that preceded it.
Cinema followed, with the heroines of the movement that would later be called blaxploitation: Tamara Dobson in Cleopatra Jones in 1973, Pam Grier in Foxy Brown in 1974. These films are discussed, even at the time, for the stereotypes they perpetuate. They nevertheless remain, for many female viewers, the first opportunity to see a Black woman at the center of the frame, styled like them.
That is where the shift happens. A hairstyle that was worth taking a stand for becomes a silhouette to reproduce, then a product aisle. The two readings have coexisted since, and there is no need to choose: you can perfectly wear this hairstyle today for the sole reason that you find it beautiful, provided you know that this choice has not always been free.
What the afro comb tells us
An object summarizes this trajectory. The long-toothed comb, which was used to lift the roots and open the shape, becomes in those years an emblem that is worn planted in the hair, sometimes with a handle in a clenched fist. It leaves the bathroom for fashion photography, exactly like the hairstyle it served to shape.
The confusion dates from there, and it still follows us: many women grew up believing that this comb was the tool for detangling. It never was. Used to undo knots on dry hair without product, it breaks, and it breaks all the more when you use it with the conviction of doing well.
France and the Antilles at the same time
On this side of the Atlantic, the afro arrives mostly through records and movie theaters, without the social movement that had carried it. It is received as an American look, and it does not displace, in the Hexagon as in the Antilles, a long-established practice of relaxing hair. The postcard shows the exceptions, not the rule.
The sequel is, moreover, more telling than the 70s themselves. Thirty years later, relaxing hair remained an expected step for many young girls from the Antilles, and natural hair continued to belong mostly to the elders. This gap could be read within the same family, from one generation to the next.
In the Antilles, in the 2000s, you would see three generations side by side. Older women often kept their natural hair, women in their thirties relaxed their hair, and we, the children, remained natural until twelve or fourteen. Entering high school served as a rite of passage toward relaxing hair. My mother was relaxed and refused to relax me, because she could clearly see that it stung. I, I wanted to look like her.
Ghana Elin, founderIn other words, what the 70s opened in the United States took decades to become an ordinary choice in France. It was the movement of the 2010s that did this work, with blogs, videos and workshops, and it continues: see five French personalities who wear their afro, and why so many salons still do not know how to style kinky hair.
Wearing an afro today
The round shape that is associated with the decade is not obtained by planting a comb in dry and bare hair. It comes from hydrated hair, detangled without breakage, then stretched. In the Rituel Texture®, everything happens during the protective drying: The Styling Cream is applied to the entire length, then the drying is done with a hair dryer, in small sections and always in motion. It is this step that gives the volume, much more than the styling that follows.
Detangling, on the other hand, is done beforehand, with fingers and on dry hair: it is the detangling with the African finger, the first step of the complete routine. The Man Dol' Comb only comes in afterwards, on lengths coated with the Repair Mask.
For the rest, an afro holds up better than we think. At night, a silk scarf and a silk pillowcase are enough to keep the shape for the next day. Between two routines, avoid wetting your head every morning to revive the volume: the gesture relieves in the moment and fatigues the fiber in the long run. A complete routine every 7 to 10 days does the job better. Our detailed advice can be found in our article on kinky hair volume.
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Sources
- Angela Y. Davis, “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 21, n° 1, autumn 1994, p. 37-45.
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, list of the ten most wanted fugitives, notice n° 309, Angela Yvonne Davis, listed on August 18, 1970, arrested on October 13, 1970.
- “The Fashion Show that Helped Launch a Movement”, Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn Public Library, January 2022, on the Naturally '62 show of January 28, 1962.
