With your finger or a few taps with the mouse, you can generate a wild, towering head of hair.
A new delightful interactive feature on London’s Victoria and Albert Museum allows users to create their own 18th-century wigs, with spools of hair that ooze like cake icing. The game doubles as a clever invitation to the V&A’s newly refurbished European galleries, which reopened in December.
Give it a whirl here.
The V&A houses the most encyclopedic collection of dress and fashion in the world, but even it must constantly try new tricks to to draw tech-savvy visitors to its collections.
More and more museums are turning to the conventions of social media, in the process creating amusing juxtapositions between high art and pop culture. The Tate, for example, has been experimenting with user-generated memes, emojis and gifs on its Tumblr page.
V&A’s Design-a-Wig game also delivers a dose of art history. From playing a round or two, you might learn that those precarious Victorian era wigs, decked with feathers, jewels and miniature ships could take a full day to construct, or that they were at times augmented with hair from horses. They were also held together with stinky pig fat called “gooey paste,” so odious that perfumed powders were used to mask their stench—making a digital version all the more preferable.
