Tignon

The tignon law (1786) required free women of color in Saint-Domingue and Louisiana to cover their hair with a headwrap, intended to mark their subordinate racial status and suppress visible displays of wealth or beauty. Rather than accepting this humiliation, free women of color transformed the tignon into a conspicuous form of adornment — using costly cloth, careful wrapping techniques, and decorative additions to make the required headcover itself a statement of presence and refinement. The tignon became a canonical example of the appropriation of imposed constraint as a site of agency.