Why Tina Turner’s Mega Mullet Was a Image of Rebirth

Yesterday, the world misplaced a beacon of favor, soul, and resilience. Tina Turner handed away on the age of 83, leaving a legacy of highly effective music and the type of presence that legends are manufactured from—elements evidenced by her award-winning music, ever-evolving style, and that symbolic, iconic hair.

“Tina Turner’s hair is so iconic that it’s totally and immediately identifiable, even out of context,” says Rachael Gibson, also referred to as The Hair Historian. “You see that shaggy, supersized, spiky-but-soft form, and it couldn’t be anybody else.” That hair, although—significantly the aforementioned type that represented her private {and professional} renaissance—was all right down to wigs, a software on which the ‘Queen of Rock’ n Roll’ relied on for versatility, although the unique alternative was born of necessity.

The start of Turner’s profession was marked by smooth, of-the-moment hair, ’60s kinds that oozed glamour and a specific amount of demureness—assume banged blowouts, pin curls, and bouffants. However after an unlucky (or fated) salon journey left her pure lengths broken, Turner turned to wigs, a call which helped to form the majority of her profession.

“I’m not stunned when folks assume my wig is my very own hair as a result of I’ve all the time thought of it an extension of myself. In a means, it’s my hair,” shared Turner in her memoir, Tina Turner: My Love Story. The performer constructed and styled lots of her personal wigs, the natural-looking outcomes contributing considerably to her picture—and her confidence. “As she stepped into her personal within the ’80s and left behind the toxicity of her previous, the hair offered the right visible shorthand that one thing had modified,” says Gibson, referencing Turner’s rockstar resurgence after cut up along with her notoriously abusive husband Ike Turner. “Gone had been the sleek kinds, sweeping bangs, and flippy ends, changed with an entirely distinctive, frizzed-out mega mullet. It’s hair that’s all about energy—it’s hair as armor.”