Toupee or not toupee?

"Anyone you see on the red carpet, they've all got hairpieces." This remark, from a beauty PR, seemed a slight exaggeration - I think we'd detect it if men were up to it, too - but it does seem that hair is the latest zone of a woman's appearance to have traversed into the realms of fake plumping-up. At the Met Ball, as I found myself looking down on Madonna in the dinner throng (she is tiny) and admiring her Thirties movie-star tresses, someone hissed in my ear: "It's probably a wig, you know."

I can think of a time in my life when I'd have been shocked and disapproving about the idea of hairpiece-wearing. In the Eighties, the rule of wash 'n' wear - the idea that hair should be "natural", that all it needed was "a good cut" every six weeks, and that it would look best that way - held such sway I even remember thinking hairdryers were a chichi, bourgeois old-lady thing. To have false anything - eyelashes, hair colour, tan, let alone breasts - seemed faintly disgusting to a generation of fine young feminists.

Now, I'm more of the laissez-faire opinion that what is acceptable in beauty is just a matter of fashion, not morality. I still can't ever see myself going under the knife or having part of my bottom injected into my face to improve my looks, but I can't think of a way this new hair thing is offensively invasive.

In the history of hairstyling, the last time "switches" - hairpieces that come with clips for attaching to hair -were in widespread use was in the late Sixties and early Seventies. But from that period there are so many photographs of coiled-up hair, modelled by the likes of Veruschka, I've always secretly found inspiring that now I'm thinking, well, why not? Using fake locks as transformative accessories is only part of fashion play, and a potentially lot of fun on a night out - just so long as they don't fall off into your soup.

fashion.telegraph.co.uk