What possessed the production of Star Wars to equip Leia with her now icon haircut? Did it stem from mexican freedom fighters? Indians? Or was it something closer to the pulp and WWII-based sources that Star Wars generally draws from?
As iconic as X-Wings and lightsabers, the hairstyles of Leia continue to enchant and baffle.
And of those, the most well-known is without a doubt ‘the buns’. Ridiculous in a way, even for a film as outlandish as Star Wars, yet it’s hard to imagine Leia without them. But how’d they come to be? Let’s go to our man on the street:
“In the 1977 film, I was working very hard to create something different that wasn’t fashion, so I went with a kind of Southwestern Pancho Villa woman revolutionary look, which is what that is. The buns are basically from turn-of-the-century Mexico. Then it took such hits and became such a thing.” [George Lucas, 1]leiashair
One possible image Lucas could be talking about is this one of Clara de la Rocha, a mexican revolutionary, which while somewhat hard to read does seem to show a pair of Leia-like hair buns.
From ‘Star Wars and the Power of Costume’ exhibition at The Denver Art Museum.
There is however another image that pops up here and there in relation to Leia’s hair, sometimes cited as one of Pancho Villa’s wives. It is in fact A Hopiland Beauty (from Arizona) by renown native american photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis. It does bear some resemblance to the buns, and given that Padme wears a hairstyle almost exactly like it in Episode II, one can’t be faulted for thinking that there might be a connection there.
However, given that most of Lucas's influences came from film, TV and comics, a few other maybe more likely alternatives spring to mind. The first is the least likely, namely The Dambusters, in which the professor’s wife, in the very beginning of the film, sports a pair of unmistakable buns. The Dambusters of course played a major part in the conceptualization of the climactic Battle of Yavin, and so there’s no denying that Lucas had seen it, and probably many times over.
Another possibility is that of Dr. Barbara Gordon, or Batgirl, though I merely bring it up for the sake of being completionist, because even though Lucas was an avowed comic book nerd, I never got the impression that he would have read Batgirl. But, anything is possible.
No, if I were a betting man, I would put my money not on high-brow, ethnic and multi-cultural influences for Star Wars, but on adventure movies and pulp comics, preferably in the sci-fi genre. And it just so happens that there a perfect candidate that fits that description to a tee:
Queen Fria, ruler of Frigia (the ice world that inspired Hoth) of the Flash Gordon comic, as drawn by its creator, Alex Raymond in 1939, for The Ice Kingdom of Mongo. And here it’s worth noting that Fria – whose name isn’t dissimilar to Leia – also has a third, even larger bun, on the back of her blond head, but beyond that the similarity is quite striking, and more in line with Lucas’s influences in general, than obscure Mexican revolutionary women’s unlikely hair.
Prosecution rests.
Jess Cagle. So What’s the Deal with Leia’s Hair? Time Magazine. Time Inc., April 21, 2002.
WWII was an enormous influence on all kids of the 50s and 60s, and Lucas was no exception. From the general good vs evil nature of the conflict to the specifics of war epics like The Guns of Navarone and air-heroics of The Dam Busters and 633 Squadron, it seems entirely possible that Star Wars would never have existed if not for the war.
