ELMHURST, Ill. — Before Marge Simpson, Amy Winehouse or Audrey Hepburn wore their hair in the famous beehive, there was Margaret Vinci Heldt and her salon on Chicago’s ritzy Michigan Avenue.
As the 92-year-old retired hairstylist tells it, Modern Beauty Shop magazine (now Modern Salon) was looking for a new design, something different to feature in its February 1960 issue. She came up with the beehive.
“I went home and I thought, What am I going to do that hasn’t done before?” Heldt said in an interview in her apartment, surrounded by scrapbooks filled with pictures of her hair designs.
Inspiration came to her in a little black velvet hat, shaped like a small bump and lined on the inside with red lace. Heldt went downstairs to her family room one night while her family was sleeping. She put on a little music and started working with hair atop a mannequin head.
“Before you know it something was coming out,” she said. “And I thought, I like this.”
It became what the magazine called “the beehive.” Now more than a half-century later, Heldt is garnering accolades and attention.
Today the hat sits atop a gold metallic hat box on Heldt’s living room coffee table. The box reads “Lorraine’s Footlight Hat Shop.”
This March the trade group Cosmetologists Chicago will give its first scholarship in Heldt’s name for creativity in hairdressing, and the Chicago History Museum is taking steps to include that velvet hat and mannequin into its collection.
The beehive became a cultural phenomenon during the 1960s and evolved into a style worn today as Hollywood’s starlets walk red carpets.
“If it’s done right it’s so classic,” said Jay Manuel, creative director and judge on “America’s Next Top Model” and host of the “Style Her Famous” makeover series.
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