History
Liberty spikes trace their origins to the Ancient Britons. Warriors washed their long dark hair in lime water, which also bleached it blond. This hairstyle was highly symbolic as a badge of honor and manhood: Celts were not allowed to spike or cut their hair until they had killed an enemy. After the subjugation of Britain spiked hair fell out of use in favor of short Roman haircuts. In the silent film era some actors, like comedian Harold Lloyd, experimented with spiked hair to stand out from the crowd, although this trend did not catch on with ordinary people. This changed in the 1970s when the emerging British punk subculture chose messy, choppy hair in reaction to the long smooth styles worn by hippies and disco fans. Originally the spikes were small, as worn by modern-day metrosexuals and pop-punk fans, but by the 1980s this had evolved to tall liberty spikes, sometimes over a foot in length. Liberty spikes were also worn by the Goth subculture, although in this case they were dyed black instead of the bright unnatural colors favored by punk rockers.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)