Queen Charlotte and her crowning glory: The wigs of Bridgerton Season 2 aren't just architectural marvels but a representational win

Sitting outside the costume department, Dress Didi a ringside feminist take on fashion in films and anything watch-able. Know more about the real  dress dadas.  * There is something fantastic about cotton candy, the way the pink cloud of spun sugar manifests almost out of nothing, like magic. Shondaland’s Regency-era slow burn romance Bridgerton Season 2 is all eye candy but Queen Charlotte’s hair is all kinds of magical cotton candy. It is a cute coincidence that in Bangla, cotton candy is called “burir chul,” meaning an old woman’s hair. The “old woman” in question, Queen of the ton, rules the roost with her jaw-dropping wigs.

Each headpiece is a towering marvel, festooned, bejeweled, and painstakingly textured. The wigs are central to her character, designed to make sure everyone knows who’s in charge.

Queen Charlotte (played by Golda Rosheuvel) is never seen without one, even at home while reading the gossip rags or playing with her Corgis. And god forbid, she never repeats a wig. This attention to hair was the vision of the series’ creators  and Marc Pilcher, the show’s hair and make-up lead, who won an Emmy Award for Season 1. Pilcher tragically died of COVID-19 in October 2021, and the first episode of Season 2 is dedicated to him. Lead hair and make up designer for Season 2 Erika Ökvist and her team have continued to build on the vision to create incredible head pieces for Queen Charlotte in this season.  

Ökvist points out they worked on the “incredible hair journeys” of all the characters, and thought about each one’s characteristic qualities they could communicate through hair. The feisty Kate Sharma’s braid, for example, is a nod to her Indian heritage, and as she unravels over the arc of the story, so does her hair.   Of course, everything pales in comparison to Queen Charlotte’s massive head pieces. The internet is abuzz with her wigs, ranked in style and impact. Netflix itself has archived them, ranked by height.  Some are clear favourites – the giant heart-shaped grey one in which she chooses the season’s diamond. A more controlled version of an Afro studded with pearls, inspired by Beyonce. An ombre wedding cake of a wig, worn at the doomed wedding. A white macramé inspired one, contained with netting and jewels. A blue themed wig with peacock feathers, alluding to Sharma’s colour scheme and India. [caption id=“attachment_10542161” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Kate Sharma in Bridgerton Season 2[/caption] The wigs themselves, as    Ökvist revealed, are constructed like cages, with hair on the outside but hollow inside to reduce the weight it would put on Rosheuvel’s neck. “It’s a matter of getting a balance,” says Ökvist, “So you have to think about it architecturally.”   As the weight of the hair itself could make the structure collapse, the creators would have to construct the piece differently based on the shape, so the weight of the hair is distributed evenly.    Ökvist says, “If we wanted to do a wig that shot straight up, we’d have to do crosshatching to accommodate for the cross weight, so it doesn’t fall down. It’s akin to the way you build a bridge with keystones.” Additionally, to account for the embellishments, as the piece gets taller or wider, recesses are built in – “hair caves” – in which the queen’s crown or tiaras can be nested.

From just two wigs in the original characterisation of Queen Charlotte, the creators now have 25 wigs. Each piece is an architectural marvel, but what is also interesting is that they make a statement about Queen Charlotte’s multi-racial background with dreadlocks, cornrows, braids, and the different textures of Black hair that they represent. This was intentional, as Pilcher had stated in an interview, “Well, I want to introduce the looks of her heritage, not just copy portraits of white people.” There is also no colour off bounds for Queen Charlotte, abandoning all conventions of how “older women” should look and dress. “ There is no colour she will not wear!” said Rosheuvel gleefully. Wearing the wigs, however, cannot have been an easy task. (Even lesser headpieces have made ramp models faint backstage at Fashion Weeks.) Rosheuvel, who calls them “works of art”, has gone on record to also talk about the physical challenges of balancing with the wigs, including how the original Beyonce-inspired afro of S1 caused her scalp to heat up alarmingly. She had to insert cold metal combs into the wigs to cool her scalp. “Those combs saved my life," she wrote on Instagram, with a behind-the-scenes picture of herself with the combs sticking out of the afro.  

Ökvist and her team made special efforts to reduce the weight of the wigs as much as possible, for instance, by sourcing the lightest possible wire to create the cages. In fact, the crew created a special neck brace for her that attaches to the chair and supports Rosheuvel and her wigs when she sits down.   Heavy lies the head that wears the crown, indeed. But oh, what a head. Of glorious, multi-racial, rainbow-coloured hair. Bridgerton Season 2 is streaming on Netflix. Manjima Bhattacharjya is the author of  Mannequin: Working Women in India’s Glamour Industry [Zubaan, 2018] and Intimate City [Zubaan, 2022]. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.