The hairstyle is to a person what the summit is to a mountain. While the latter often eludes our gaze, draped in clouds, the summits of human beings are almost always visible — especially in those latitudes that have given up the permanent use of bonnets, hats and headscarves. A trove of photographs by Peter Gaechter, made for the Zürich hairdresser Elsässer Pour Dames, bears witness to the changes and revivals of hairstyling in Switzerland. Beginning in the 1970s and ending in the 90s, this publication gathers photographs from the so-called “show books” that lay in the salon of the high-end coiffeur and represented the current hair trends. Visible here are not only sculptural-looking coiffures, meant to be reproduced as identically as possible on the heads of clients, but also indicators of the zeitgeist. Whether “Cold War Kids,” “Punk,” “Five-Finger Blow-Dry,” “70s Charlie's Angels fringe” or “Old Hollywood” — the manifold hairstyles of the depicted local beauties, It-girls and actresses manifest both the why-not arbitrariness of liberal consumer cultures and concrete social change. Not least, Gaechter's photographs testify to an era in which the trade of photography was still marked by the spirit of professionalism.