Stardust Memories:

It is possible to date a snapshot by examining the hairstyles worn by its subjects. by the same token, the study of hair can help us understand changes affecting whole nations. Society is in constant flux, and so is hair.

Consider the startling change in women's hairstyles between 1945 and the mid-60's. when American soldiers came home after World War II, their wives and girlfriends jettisoned defense-industry jobs and practical 'dos to return to more stereotypically "feminine" domestic lives- and they adopted structured hairdos that had to be obsessively tended. The rigidity of women's hair during this period (and the compact, hard-edged cuts favored by most men) reflected the repressed state of the nation - particularly in matters of sex and gender.

Good Housekeeping, for example, sang the praises of hairspray in a 1955 article title "Spray To Make Your Hair Behave." But "it wasn't just hair that was supposed to 'behave,' to be smooth, mannerly and disciplined' and to stay 'meekly in place.'" McCracken write. "Forty years of feminist theory later, its' pretty clear what Good Housekeeping was really saying: Spray to Make the Self Behave."

Enter British hair magnate Vidal Sassoon, purveying a geometric, boblike cut that created a sensation when it debuted in 1963 on the head of obscure actress Nancy Kwan. Soon women from Jane Fonda to Liza Minneli to Mia Farrow were going to Sassoon.

Sassoon believed that when a woman's head moved, her hair should move with her. In the context of the time, this was a radical idea. the 50's philosophy that hair(read: femininity) was a fearsome, unruly beast that should be forced to "behave" was rendered absurd by Sassoon's elegant yet simple styles. the hairdresser's cuts celebrated spontaneous, bold, sexy women who did what they wished and became whomever they chose.

"What Vidal Sassoon did was the equivalent of taking women out of girdles," says Annemarie Iverson, beauty and health director for Harper's Bazaar. "He let them be free."

Sassoon helped women- and men- see their hair in a new light, McCracken writes. It wasn't an irrelevant crop of follicles to be whipped into obedience, but "an opportunity for metamorphosis. Hair provided the opportunity for an entire society to swing."

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a jokeword these nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo's rapier or Lucrezia's poison vial.

There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading the Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That make two of them.

And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

The first time millions of women say Mrs. Kennedy in a pillbox hat or Miss Hepburn in that slinky black day dress in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" or Princess Grace in a strapless evening gown with satin stole, they thought, gee, maybe I could be like that some day....

In the world of the 1950's, in which they first flowered, everyone was dressed up, mothers washed dishes in high heels and fathers never went downtown without hats. It was a world in which the way you looked "reflected" on your family, on your school, on your town, on your Government. Style was handcuffed to class in a way that it is hard to believe today. Clothes that identified you as poor made you the object of scorn. That rigid prescription - what you wear is who you are an how you should be treated - ruled life and was so ridiculous that it led to almost an entire generation to view formality as an instrument of oppression and to embrace casual clothing as a political statement.

In the late 50's and early 60's, that high style, as epitomized by French and American couture, was reserved for an almost godlike class. That sort of elegance was so far out reach for most women that it almost represented fantasy. One did not see in department store windows or on the racks the Givenchys that Audrey Hepburn wore in the movies. They were locked away in velvet salons that no middle-class woman would ever think of entering. Reading Vogue and Harper's Bazaar in that period was, for most women, an exercise in esthetics, like wandering through a fashion museum.

But Miss Hepburn, Princess Grace and Mrs. Kennedy made elegance appear accessible. On them, couture look real - comfortable, wearable, right. They each possessed an essential all-American-girl quality that somehow softened the elite nature of their style and made it seem familiar and even imitable. You could say that as patrician as they were, they helped break down stringent class barriers by appearing to be, despite what they had on, rather friendly and normal, by being, as the Beatles put it later, not what they appeared to be.

And yet, of course, they were exactly what they appeared to be - well bred, wealthy and highly positioned. But they were catalysts of the 60's revolutions they preceded in that their style was invitational and not exclusive.

To millions of American women, Miss Hepburn, Mrs. Kennedy and Princess Grace opened doors to a world previously restricted - they gave tours. They modernized the term ladylike, and gave it youth and life. They were a free finishing school.