Your Wig Is Judging You

Nobody warns you about the wig. They warn you about the exams and the sleepless pupillage and the terrifying first time you rise to your feet and hear your own voice fill a courtroom. But the wig, that small pale crown you will spend a startling amount of money on, arrives in your life with no manual and no ceremony, and you are simply expected to know what to do with it. You do not. Almost nobody does. We learn wig care the way we learn most things at the bar, by fumbling, by minor disasters, and by the quiet horror of watching something expensive lose its dignity on a shelf. So allow us, with great affection, to spare you some of the fumbling.

Begin by changing your mind about what the thing actually is. A wig is not an accessory in the way that a good watch or a fine pen is an accessory. It is closer to an heirloom you happen to have bought new. Treated with even modest respect, a proper Australian wool wig will outlast the case that made you cry in the car park, the season you were sure would break you, and quite possibly the first decade of your career. Treated with contempt, it will sulk. It will sag, it will yellow, and it will choose to do so on the morning of something important, because a wig, like all things that sense your panic, has an unerring instinct for the worst possible timing.

The first kindness you can offer is a home and not a drawer, nor a handbag, nor the back seat of a taxi where it will spend the week slowly flattening into the shape of your despair. A wig wants a stand, something that holds its curls in the air and lets it keep the shape it was so carefully given. When it travels, it wants its bag, a proper one, and not a plastic sachet that traps the heat and the damp against it. Shape is everything with a wig. Lose the shape and you have lost the wig, and no amount of apologizing to it afterwards will bring the curl back to attention.

Then there is the small matter of the weather, which in this country is not a small matter at all. Our humidity is patient and it is thorough, and it would like nothing more than to move into your wig and raise a family of mildew there. The harmattan, meanwhile, arrives with its own opinions, drying and dulling everything it touches. A wig left to the mercy of either will tell the tale on your head. Keep it somewhere cool and dry, let it breathe, and never fold it away while it is even slightly damp, unless your ambition is to open the bag one morning to a smell you will not soon forget.

Handle it, when you must, as though it belonged to someone you respect, because in a sense it does, to a future you who will still be wearing it. Resist the urge to fuss and fiddle and reshape it with anxious fingers before every hearing. The curls are set. They do not need your help, and they certainly do not need whatever miracle product a well meaning cousin has recommended. When a wig genuinely needs cleaning or reviving, and in time it will, that is a job for a careful hand and, if you are unsure, a professional one. A wig is not the place to experiment. The courtroom is unforgiving enough without your headwear staging a protest of its own.

On court days and travelling days the rule is simply this: get it there safely and get it there in shape. A wig that arrives crushed has already lost half its authority before you have said a word, and half of what a wig does for you is quietly announce that you are a person who takes the occasion seriously. Carry it in its bag, keep it off the floor and away from the sun on the dashboard, and give it a moment to settle when you arrive, the way you give yourself one.

Do all of this, and here is your reward. The wig ages the way the best things age, softening rather than spoiling, becoming less a purchase and more a companion. It gathers your mornings into itself, the nervous ones and the triumphant ones, and it keeps them. One day, if you are fortunate, you will hand it to someone younger and greener and watch the same weight settle on their shoulders that once settled on yours. That is the quiet ambition of a well kept wig, to become the sort of thing that gets passed on.

None of this is difficult. It asks only that you treat the thing on your head with a fraction of the seriousness you bring to the arguments beneath it. The wig does not ask for love, exactly. It asks for a stand, a bag, a dry corner and a little restraint. Give it those, and it will serve you with the loyalty of something that was made, properly and by careful hands, to last.