Show a well dressed Vintage bald (balding) man???

[rtrann9ball]

Hello gents,

I feel like hair is a quintessential part of vintage wear, and do I love my hair.. or what I have left of it.

I'm sure as many of you on here are dealing with the same problem as well, and the fear of losing the hair is maybe losing the style as well? Now, I refuse to take meds to try to fight it. With the side effects, it's like a terrible "what if" game a child plays, "what if you can grow all your hair back?? BUT, your penis falls off!" Eh.. no thanks!

So calling all bald and balding gents to show off their vintage style while bald! Work it! Show it! Be proud of it!

Thanks guys!

 

[GHT]

Welcome to The Lounge. Here in the UK one of the perennial jokes about treating baldness is to suggest having a warren of rabbits tattooed on the bald plate. From a distance they look like hares. But joking aside, I have heard that hair loss can lead to depression, and that's not very funny at all.

The hormone behind hair loss. Dihydrotestosterone (DHT) is made from testosterone by an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase. The actions of DHT and the sensitivity of hair follicles to DHT is what causes hair loss. So I have always wandered if baldness is an excess of testosterone. Isn't libido linked to testosterone? If it is then what nature takes in one hand.........

Off the top of my head, these guys seem to embrace hair loss:

Patrick Stewart
Bruce Willis
Sean Connery
Ben Kingsley
Yul Brynner
Michael Jordan
Samuel L. Jackson
Howie Mandel

Personally, I would much rather see a bald plate than a hair piece, about the only wig that was believable was that of the late Bruce Reynolds. His always matched his beard so he never had youthful hair while the rest of his body aged.

 

[Edward]

Baldness is associated with two key causes, I'm told: testosterone (which could explain the subconscious appeal in some obsessed-with-manliness quarters of the far right at one time and another, historically speaking), and stress.

I always had fine hair; it started to thin noticerably when I was in my mid-late twenties; by twenty-six I was getting shorter and shorter buzzcuts to try and hide it. At 32 I realised that even a number one twice a week wasn't hiding it, so I reached for the razor. My only regret is that I didn't do it five or six years earlier; embracing my baldness and going full-shave turned out to be liberating. (Probably helped that I came up through the Rocky Horror cvommunity where being slightly eccentric and flamboyantly bald wasn't exactly frowned on.... ). I've been shaving my head for longer than I've been into the 'vintage' thing, so it's always been a significant part of 'my' vintage look. It wasn't common, of course, back in the day, but there were men in the 20s through 1960s who shaved their heads, mostly military types. Yul Brynner shaved his head first for, as memory serves, The King and I, then decided as it gave him such a distinctive, exotic look to keep it and it became his trademark so to speak. TBH, I've never found it held me back (either with a vintage 'look' or with attracting ladies into the vintage look, if that's a concern - a surprising number of women express an active preference for a bald pate - I did have to get used to having it regularly pawed!). It won't pass for common in that era, but then it's not, imo, as wholly out of place in any era as a very specific period haircut. I just need to lose a couple of stone now as I'm bordering on looking like Mussolini at the minute.

Aside from the full shave, most men go bald at some point, and that was as true then as now (the only difference is men of Generation X and younger are currently losing our hair on average a decade earlier than our fathers; premature baldness is particularly common among academics for whatever reason). Don't be misled by Hollywood, which used toupes to great extent; most men lost their hair and simply got on with it. The notion that you have to have a specific haircut and a full head of hair to look 'vintage correct' is as much a falsity as the notion that men only ever wore spearpoint collars in the 30s and 40s.

 

[Hap Hapablap]

My hair is pretty bad and I just get a nice, traditional fade and part what I have left on top. And it makes me look like a respectable, old, vintage fuddy duddy. I think it's when I DON'T wear vintage that it starts looking bad. I have no pics of myself, but here are two of my favorite men of the 20th century, Kurt Weill and Piet Mondrian, both just rolling with it.

 

[Mathematicus]

I'm 28 and I've still got the same thick hair I had when I was 16, just a little bit darker.
When I look around myself I realise I am a rare exception as most guys about my age and even yonger are already at a quite advanced status of baldness.
My brother and I use to joke about who will start losing hair first and, as comical as it sounds (he's 8 years younger than me), he seems to be "winning" as his front hairline is receding back every year.

My late grandfather died at 62 years old and still had very good hair, no balding at all in the middle of the head and only slight receding of front hairline.

I wish genetics will be on my side!

 

[GHT]

The title of the thread does say well dressed vintage. Just look at the lapels on Prince William's tux:

 

[Seb Lucas]

I'm 28 and I've still got the same thick hair I had when I was 16, just a little bit darker.
When I look around myself I realise I am a rare exception as most guys about my age and even yonger are already at a quite advanced status of baldness.
My brother and I use to joke about who will start losing hair first and, as comical as it sounds (he's 8 years younger than me), he seems to be "winning" as his front hairline is receding back every year.

My late grandfather died at 62 years old and still had very good hair, no balding at all in the middle of the head and only slight receding of front hairline.

I wish genetics will be on my side!

Hair can fall out at a range of ages. I had a friend who was bald at 18, another lost in in his 40's.

Period hair loss often look bloody awful. The comb over is thankfully mostly gone in this country but was ubiquitous in the 1950's to the 1980's. Thank God for electric clippers. Nothing looks neater than a number 2 or 3 to my eye. A shaved head looks slightly seedy unless you have the right head for it.

 

[Seb Lucas]

The title of the thread does say well dressed vintage. Just look at the lapels on Prince William's tux:
View attachment 170663 View attachment 170664

Sorry, I know nothing about tuxedos. Too wide?

 

[Mathematicus]

Sorry, I know nothing about tuxedos. Too wide?

The lapel is fine.

The collar, however, does not fit very well - it is off the neck by half an inch or so. Prince William has a definite head-forward posture and his cutter should have taken this into consideration when preparing his pattern.

 

[Edward]

Hair can fall out at a range of ages. I had a friend who was bald at 18, another lost in in his 40's.

Period hair loss often look bloody awful. The comb over is thankfully mostly gone in this country but was ubiquitous in the 1950's to the 1980's. Thank God for electric clippers. Nothing looks neater than a number 2 or 3 to my eye. A shaved head looks slightly seedy unless you have the right head for it.

I'll always have a soft spot for David Beckham as in all likelihood the primary reason why 99% of people in the UK no longer assume a white guy with a shaved head is in the army and/or a racist.

 

[Seb Lucas]

The lapel is fine.

The collar, however, does not fit very well - it is off the neck by half an inch or so. Prince William has a definite head-forward posture and his cutter should have taken this into consideration when preparing his pattern.

Interesting. I can't really discern what you are referring to from the photo. In five decades I've worn a suit maybe 3 times and never or a tux so this is an unknown aesthetics.

What I can say is the man's haircut is dreadful. It really needed to be a closer trim - it's looking like a fuzzy tennis ball that has been whacked too often.

 

[Edward]

Interesting. I can't really discern what you are referring to from the photo. In five decades I've worn a suit maybe 3 times and never or a tux so this is an unknown aesthetics.

What I can say is the man's haircut is dreadful. It really needed to be a closer trim - it's looking like a fuzzy tennis ball that has been whacked too often.

It's an older photo, I think - he seems to have been clipping it shorter recently, though like so many of us now it's still very obvious how bald he is on top. Unfortunate to have to lose your hair at a young age and so publicly.

 

[Nobert]

Something with which I have been struggling with for a decade or two now, as my current profile picture will attest to. I refuse to go the head-shaving route, partly out of a vague, stubborn spite (New England, represent!), but also because I have a narrow, tapered skull that I'm pretty sure would look absurd if completely denuded.

 

[Bushman]

Naturally...

 

[Edward]

Naturally...

Churchill dressed well, I absolutely grant him that, though his image is hardly typical of men of his age at the time: partly his personal wealth as a member of the aristocracy, partly that his image was always very carefully controlled. Even at the aged of eighty neither he nor his wife could bear to have him portrayed in a way that suggested any element of frailty, believed to be the reason why Lady Churchill had Sutherland's masterful portrait of Churchill at eighty destroyed not long after it was presented to him as a gift funded by other parliamentarians:

 

[Seb Lucas]

I love the fact the fact that Churchill wore boiler suits almost exclusively at home and one of his great hobbies was bricklaying.

In carefully controlling his public image, he was clearly ahead of his time. Almost everyone does this to ludicrous levels today.

 

[Edward]

I rather liked Churchill's 'saracen suits'. I've evne toyed with the idea of having one or two run up, though I'd prefer them in something washable like drill cotton rather than worsted, just for enhanced practicality. There's something rather retro-futurist about them as both concept and look.

 

[Short Balding Guy]

Hello gents,

So calling all bald and balding gents to show off their vintage style while bald! Work it! Show it! Be proud of it!

Thanks guys!

I see that posters contributed historic bald fellows. They are gentlemen at the top of their game. I play in a different "game" than the examples given. Their game is very high. I try to dress well. I am bald. I humbly submit the below pics of me a bald fellow working on dressing better.

 

[Wolf99]

Gabriele d’Annunzio. Sometime poet, novelist, narcissist, war monger, war hero, adulterer, womaniser, self publicist, duke, city state dictator, proto-facist, style icon and all around arse:

Noel Coward provides a good example of someone who went bald:

 

[Benny Holiday]

I see that posters contributed historic bald fellows. They are gentlemen at the top of their game. I play in a different "game" than the examples given. Their game is very high. I try to dress well. I am bald. I humbly submit the below pics of me a bald fellow working on dressing better.

Working on? Nay, sir, goal achieved time and again on your part.