ABSTRACT
Ponytails on men, thanks to the long-established Puritan moral aesthetic, The Puritan roots were established in large part by Elizabethan pamphleteer William Prynne, who in The Unlovelinesse of Love-Lockes, damned long hair as unnatural for men and blamed it on "this Vaine, Fantastique, Idle, Proud, Effeminate, and wanton age". Teenagers adopted the look because it struck them as a rebellion against adult standards; in reality, however, it was a gesture of conformity in that its universal popularity rendered them one of the crowds. By the 1990s, the trend had reached truly faddish proportions, stoked by an endless parade of movie stars and fashion magazine ads with megastars such as Sean Connery, Robert DeNiro, and Marlon Brando sporting ponytails. Men wore ponytails as a means of looking hipper or attempting to recapture their youth. By 1991, wigmaker Louis Feder had even introduced clip-on ponytails for the impatient or fainthearted interested in weekend nonconformity from within the privacy of their own homes.
