It’s time to celebrate Black men’s hair.

WatchCut is taking a look at Black men with its newest video for its “100 Years of Beauty” series.

The video pays tribute to a century of the iconic hair trends for Black men in just over a minute. This video takes us through conks, high tops, cornrows and more, and you have to check it out.

One of the employees, Chris Chan, talked about how the style from each decade was modeled after certain people or groups in history. His crew drew inspiration from William J. Powell Jr., Little Richard, Jean-Michael Basquiat, and more.

Chan was very clear that he wanted to show how Black men’s hairstyles go deeper than what may have been trendy at that time.

“One thing we wanted to be very clear about in this video is that hair and politics are always intertwined,” he said.

The physical change through hair was a result of the men who felt policed by Eurocentric beauty standards who later embraced their own defiant and liberating styles.

You have to see the video below.

(Photo Credit: WatchCut Screenshot / YouTube)

Author

  • Travis Henry is a senior at Rutgers University studying Communication, with a concentration in Strategic Public Relations and Public Communication, and French. Currently, he is looking at the relationship between consumer brands and African-American youth and how the Black-white racial segregation has manifested online. When he is not doing research at school or writing at work, he finds himself “curating the human experience” via his magazine DWNTWN and editing his school’s magazine Voice. He sees himself in the future finding a career that hybrids music, activism, media, and writing.