... and that it is possible to change the world.

This message is more important than ever in these days. Still we are confronted with unjustified wars all over the world, and we ought to use all our power to fight this.

One central leitmotif in Hair is racial segregation, the Civil Rights Movement had been in progress a while at that time already. Blacks stood up for their rights and demanded equal rights as well as power, both of which the white establishment was not willing to give away. All this can be found in Hair.

The hippie movement, starting from San Francisco, questions the ideals of wealth of the middle class which are devoided of meaning in their eyes and preached an attitude towards a life free of restraints or white-bread taboos.
Compared with the movement of 1968, it was dominated rather by individualistic than by sociopolitical concepts. The idea of a more peaceful and humane life was connected to the term „flower power“.

The core of the hippie philosophy is the total, liberal, sociopacifist, tolerant individualism.
What they had in common was their renunciation of the authoritarian life style of the 1960s.

Hippies adorned themselves with flowers as a sign for peace and love, an attribute which was soon to be picked up by fashion industries and transformed into soemthing socially acceptable. Therefore they were also called “flower children“. Men as well as women let their hair grow and wore beads and chains. “Free love“ and free drug consumption became accepted.

The long hair of young men and dingy clothing like tattered blue jeans and a sort of “grandfather-fashion“ with vests were popular symbols for a protesting attitude towards the establishment. The response from parts of the population consisted of insulting them as bums or slackers. Hair describes the feelings of many young people of that time, especially those being part of the hippie culture. The hippies were not children roaming the streets but bourgeoisie adolescents influenced by student's revolts: students in high school or college, but also “freaks“.

 

At that time men were drafted into the US Army and fell in Vietnam. The country was torn within. It literally burst in anger and outrage. Those in favour of the war directed their anger at the hippies. And Hair was right in the center of all of it.

In April of 1967, 400.000 people went to the streets of New York to demonstrate, in October of 1967 100.000 people participated in the “March on Washington“, among them the director of Hair, Bertrand Castelli, who was emprisoned for taking part. Martin Luther King, symbol of the Civil Rights Movement and opponent of the war, demanded a society freed from racism and violence in front of the Capitol in Washington.