Addio Red Heads

When Paris Designer Hubert de Givenchy outfitted his models with wigs in 1958, he thought of them merely as gimmicks. To American women the gimmick rapidly became a fact of life. According to some estimates, they now spend as much as $100 million a year on hairpieces, and their passion for perukes gave a lift to the wigmaking industry of Italy. Now Italy's wigmakers have run afoul of the Cold War, and they are tearing their hair.

Because the olive oil-rich Italian diet yields some of the world's finest, most naturally silky hair, Italian wigs are highly prized. Lately, in an effort to capitalize on the big new U.S. market for artificial hairdos, the Italians have gone all out for mass production, installed special sewing machines that turn out wigs eight times faster than by hand. As a result, they doubled production last year to 77,000 wigs worth $1,900,000 looked forward to quadrupling them this year.

No longer able to harvest enough hair locally to fill their soaring needs, the Italian wigmakers began importing hair wholesale from Red China. If it was coarser and less manageable, it was also a great deal cheaper: $20 to $50 per kilogram, depending on quality, compared with $110 to $300 for Italian hair. Then last November, alarmed at the growing number of Red heads in the U.S., the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control banned all imports containing Asian hair. Last month the U.S. Government sharpened the ban by prohibiting all wig imports from five European countries, including Italy, unless the wigs were accompanied by certificates of origin.

Since Italy has been exporting 90% of its wigs to the U.S. and relying on China for more than 80% of its hair, the ban has all but ruined the Italian wig industry, forced 80% of the companies that jumped on the wig wagon to go out of business. Even Gaetano Palombi, who earned the sobriquet King of Roman Wigmakers for his coiffures in such hairy Italianate screen extravaganzas as Ben-Hur and Cleopatra, has had to cut back his staff from 45 to twelve.

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