With every new season of 1800s high society London, there are a few things fans can look forward to from the Bridgerton Cinematic Universe: the central couple will have an epic slow-burning romance (and one will burn for the other), instrumental pop covers will serve as the soundtrack for sweeping ballroom scenes, and Queen Charlotte’s hair will be as high as our expectations. And every season, I am seated, snacks in hand, ready to gossip like Lady Whistledown from my couch and ooh and ahh over the gowns and gorgeous Black hair creations. It’s not just the fancy wigs that make Queen Charlotte’s styles spectacular; it’s that in regency era England, seeing that hair and that face reign over a fictional kingdom is thrilling, albeit slightly confusing. Abolish the monarchy — except for the fake one in which its queen rocks two-foot 4C hair with a motorized swan gliding through it just because she can.
Depending on which scholar you ask, the real Queen Charlotte may or may not have been Black — but this one (played in Bridgerton by Golda Rosheuvel) is undoubtedly so, and as we saw in the show’s prequel (where young Queen Charlotte is played by India Amarteifio), she had to fight to wear what she wanted and express herself authentically. It makes more sense through the lens Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story depicted that the queen’s clothes and hair are an extension of her independence, a subversive show of rebellion, and a display of power and purpose. She’s had to play the game carefully so that through her marriage, the ton — the aristocrats and noblemen and women of British high society — could be integrated and a more inclusive society could be born, in theory. The racial dynamics within the BCU get a little hazy if you think about them too hard (season 1 was a mess and season 2 basically ignored race altogether) but if you look at Queen Charlotte as a figurehead of representation for resilience and grace in an archaic institution, you can take her big, coily, kinky hair as an act of rebellion or just what an acceptable regal hairstyle would be if a Black woman was the one making up the arbitrary rules on what is considered acceptable.
It was very important for [the Bridgerton hair designer] to deal with different Black textures to really celebrate my Blackness through the wigs of Queen Charlotte… Nobody had ever had those conversations with me as an artist, a Black artist.
For Golda Rosheuvel, Queen Charlotte’s hair is a beautiful result of care and skill behind the camera — something she had yet to experience in her long career before Bridgerton. “On our first meeting, [Bridgerton makeup and hair designer Erika Ökvist] made me cry,” Rosheuvel tells me over Zoom from London during a packed press day for the cast. “Because it was the first time that I had been in conversation with a head of a department of that caliber — or anybody — discussing the fact that she was going to incorporate my own hair into the looks and that it was very important for her to deal with different Black textures to really celebrate my Blackness through the wigs of Queen Charlotte.” Rosheuvel is getting a bit emotional. “Nobody had ever had those conversations with me as an artist, a Black artist.” Rosheuvel says she and Ökvist are very collaborative. “[We have] conversations of how we incorporate [different] textures, you know, dreadlocks, plaited hair, curly kinks, all of that kind of stuff. She was really focused on doing that for me and the character.”
One of the wigs that caused a lot of conversation when it was first revealed in April during a teaser for Bridgerton Season 3 is the swan wig — mainly because of its innovation, boldness, and quite frankly, its historical inaccuracy. TVLine called it, “the monarch’s most jaw-dropping wig yet: a white, Fabergé egg-inspired piece complete with an oil painted backdrop and motorized crystal swans nestled inside.” It’s wild, and yes, motorized swans (or motorized anything) hadn’t technically been invented yet but this is a world in which interracial couples dance blissfully at balls in regency era England to covers of BTS and Pitbull so I think we can suspend our disbelief when it comes to a fun hairstyle. When I tell Rosheuvel that the wig has been the talk of the timeline, she laughs.
“It caused a lot of conversation for us as well!” Rosheuvel says. “[Erica] had the idea of making a wig with some kind of motorized thing in it. She had that idea at the beginning of season 2. It took two years for all the different departments to be involved and for the powers that be to actually sign off on it for the actual design and creation and storytelling… You have the ballet that’s happening in front of her. And then the swans are all moving inside the wig. I’m really proud and really happy that we managed to have that celebration for Erica because she’s an amazing hair and makeup designer.”
