Wig handicraft has few weavers

Wig handicraft has few weavers
Old French trade spinning out of style
Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, IN

In a sun-filled apartment in Paris’ historic Marais district, Marie-Therese Lebeau and her four assistants are busy at work, their hands bobbing up and down at a dizzying pace as they use crochet needles to knot single hairs onto model wooden heads.

From the master wig maker’s atelier emerges meringue-like powdered perukes like those once worn by royalty, droopy whiskers for movie stars like Gerard Depardieu and glamorous screen siren coiffures.

The painstaking work has taken a toll on Lebeau’s eyesight and she’d like to retire soon – but she hasn’t yet found a successor to keep alive her craft. Once among the country’s most respected and powerful artisans, France’s wig makers have been in steady decline since the 19th century, and are now on the brink of extinction.

Lebeau is determined that her profession not go the way of so many of France’s bygone traditional handicrafts, from bookbinding to blacksmithing. She owns what is thought to be the country’s last surviving workshop that makes handmade wigs from human hair.

“I can’t even think about (retirement) until I have someone with the skills to replace me,” said 54-year-old Lebeau, the founder of MTL Wigs. She said it might take decades to get one of her twenty-something staffers up to snuff, but pledged to “hold on for as long as it takes.”

The craft is a demanding one: It will take each woman more than a week of eight-hour days to finish a single wig. They work furiously, occasionally pausing to chat or drag on cigarettes that lay smoldering in what seems dangerous proximity to the locks of human hair.

Though MTL caters to the theater and movie industries – where hairpieces have replaced the real thing in most productions – private clients also queue up to buy Lebeau’s coveted custom wigs, made exclusively from human hair.

Each year, Lebeau buys about 175 pounds of the stuff from a wholesaler in Italy who deals in European hair – procured mostly from beauty salons in former eastern bloc countries.

The sole exceptions to Lebeau’s human-hair-only rule are the period wigs, gravity-defying mounds of ivory curls. MTL makes extravagant pieces like the Marie-Antoinette, the Louis XIV and the Henri IV from yak fur, which – naturally bone-white – requires no chemical treatment.

Besides wigs, Lebeau also makes mustaches, sideburns, and, once, a head-to-toe yeti suit made from yak fur dyed golden-brown with instant coffee.

Lebeau began her career at 14, as an apprentice to a wig maker in her native Hirson, a depressed ex-coal mining town in the north of France. At 21, she moved to Paris, where she worked for several workshops, moving from one atelier to another as each successively closed its doors.

In 1999, Lebeau launched MTL Wigs. She hired a handful of young hairdressers and trained them in the craft of “implantation” – the process of knotting individual hairs onto a “scalp” made of pieces of tulle.

The wig is thought to have originated among the ancient Egyptians as a way of protecting their shaved heads from the punishing desert sun. Also favored by the Greeks and the Romans, it fell out of fashion with the demise of the Roman Empire.

It wasn’t until French King Louis XIII donned a powdered peruke in the mid-17th century that the wig came back in style – and gave perruqiers, or wig makers, a privileged place in the social hierarchy.

In 17th-century France, wigs designated the wearer’s status. The model, material and size of the wigs were all class indicators – which meant that wig wearers were to a certain extent at the mercy of their perruquiers.

Master perruquiers – who made hairpieces for kings, counts and dukes – moved in the privileged world of the French nobility and were often privy to its secrets and intrigue.

When Lebeau was an apprentice in the 1960s, there were still a dozen perruquiers in France. But they’ve all since retired or died, she said.

Though machine-made synthetic shags start for about $42, the wigs at MTL retail for a steep $2,250. Lebeau bristled at the suggestion her hairpieces were pricey, saying handmade British and Italian wigs go for two or three times as much.

Movie hairdresser Christian Gruau agreed.

“Anyone who says Marie-Therese’s wigs are expensive just doesn’t have any idea what kind of the work goes into them,” he said.

While most productions rent wigs from MTL’s stock of 1,000-plus pieces, many movie stars opt to buy their own and reuse them in different films. Between productions, they store the wigs with Lebeau.

The atelier’s dusty backroom is stacked floor to ceiling with boxes scrawled with the names of France’s film greats. A yellowing cardboard box containing Gerard Depardieu’s mustache rubs up against one with Emmanuelle Beart’s blond bob and another with Daniel Auteil’s skull cap.

Even Hollywood actress Monica Bellucci has a box tucked away in the star-studded storeroom.

Asked how the Italian screen diva managed to tuck her famously long locks under the pixie-cut wig, Lebeau responded with a smile.

“You think Monica really has long hair?” she asked. “I’m not saying a word …”

Though MTL’s orders are booming, Lebeau worries for the future.

Young people in France have no interest in learning such a labor-intensive trade, she said.

“These days, it’s the Chinese that know how to work. Not the French.”