I cannot imagine how knowledge of this Early Modern European hairstyle has evaded me for so long. It’s absolutely disgusting and I cannot look away, but I suggest really thinking twice before you flip to the second image. I am talking about “Plica Polonica” or the “Polish Plait”. It went by a bunch of different names, but basically it was a mono-dread, a mass of hair which wearers often deliberately cultivated by not combing their hair or even treating it with melted wax or moss or other substances that would make the hair stick together in a permanent gobby way.
You can see the illustration of one from an Italian work of the 18th-century on the first slide, and an actual 19th-century specimen on the second. The hair style went by a bunch of different terms in various European languages that often suggested that people held supernatural beliefs associated with the hair style: Latin, “tricae incuborum”; Dutch “marelok”; German “Wixelzopf”; Swedish “marfotra”; and in Moravia, “skrzot”. These words have the idea of “witch” or “vexing spirit”, and get at the way that the Polish Plait was perhaps a troublesome source of illness. In peasant culture, the goal was to grow out the mono-dread because to do so would help remove the illness. Chopping off the hair mass would perhaps bring on bad health or illness, which is why people often grew these plaits as long as they could.
By the second half of the 1800s, the European medical community started to critique Polish Plaits for their lack of hygiene. A professor from Jagiellonian University named Józef Dietl went on a campaign to educate the public that the cause of the Polish Plait was not supernatural and that cutting them would not bring about illness. Blessedly, the hair style grew out of popularity.
