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The Afro originated in the United States as a style worn by a tiny minority of cosmopolitan black women and developed as a prominent symbol of racial pride in the mid-1960s. Responding to the Afro's grassroots popularity, the African American beauty culture industry mounted a largely successful effort to transform the style from political statement to fashion commodity. But the cornmodification of the Afro was not exclusively a cynical exploitation of a political symbol. Rather, the selling of the Afro often entailed a complex blending of ideals, goals, and motivations based, to varying degrees, on considerations of fashion, politics, and the bottom line.
In a 1998 article, activist Angela Davis complained that the Afro is remembered only as a nostalgic "hairdo," a development, she argues, that "reduces a politics of liberation to a politics of fashion." Davis cited, for example, a 1994 fashion spread from the magazine Vibe, which featured an actress dressed as a "revolutionary" Angela Davis circa 1969. Davis decried the use of her image as a "commodified backdrop for advertising" without reference to the historical and political context that gave the image its meaning and power in the 1960s. In fact, the recent revival of the Afro as "retro-chic" is only the latest development in a commodification process that began quite soon after the style emerged as a symbol of black pride and a rejection of "white" beauty standards. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the height of the Black Power movement, the Afro was as fashionable as it was political. The African American beauty industry, along with many black women, embraced the "natural" look, but they did not completely reject hair straightening, nor did they explicitly recognize that hair could be political. Nevertheless, the popularity of the Afro and the commercial response to that popularity contributed to a redefinition of black female beauty in the United States. Afros were part of a beauty standard that had emerged out of political struggle, whether hair stylists, cosmetics producers, and trend-followers chose to acknowledge that heritage or not. By the early 1970s, the Afro had been thoroughly commodified, but had it been completely depoliticized?1
This article derives from a larger project on African American women and commercial beauty culture in the twentieth...