“SELL your hair,” clamoured sweet-sellers in Seoul in the 1950s. The capital of South Korea had been pulverised by a three-year war with North Korea. Southern women were cutting off and selling their tresses, typically worn in a long plait or a low bun, for dollars, rice and rubber shoes.

The hawkers sold the jet-black locks to wigmakers in Guro, a district of south-western Seoul that was home to the first industrial complex built in South Korea after the war for the export market. (A year into the fighting, half of the country’s factories were in ruins.) In the 1960s thousands of female labourers soaked, stitched and styled the hair of their destitute countrywomen in Guro’s factories.

The wig industry in South Korea has proved remarkably resilient. Today it is South Korean women who are its fastest-growing source of demand. They snap them up for $1,000 apiece from Hi-Mo, a maker of custom wigs that began business in 1987 as an exporter and now dominates the domestic market. Hi-Mo Lady, a sister business, began five years ago. Its wigs and toupees are made in China with Chinese hair, mixed with a durable synthetic fibre of Hi-Mo’s own called NEXART. Demand from other countries remains huge. Fifty years after exporting their first hairpieces, South Korean-run factories, almost all of them abroad, still weave the majority of the world’s wigs, says Lee Hyun-jun of the Korean Wig Association.

The wig business in South Korea has played a lustrous role in the country’s development. By the end of the 1960s, wigs made up roughly one-tenth of South Korea’s total exports by revenue. In the next decade they became its third-most-exported product, after textiles and plywood. One-third of the wigs worn by Americans in those years are thought to have been made in South Korea (it benefited from an anti-communist ban on Chinese hair in 1965). It was then a state-sponsored industry—an emblem of dirigisme under Park Chung-hee, a dictator who seized power in a coup in 1961 and ruled for 18 years. .

Wigs turned into a symbol of South Korea’s struggle to put an end to rule by such strongmen. Among Park’s cheerleaders was YH Trade, a wigmaker that was founded in 1966 with ten workers and expanded to 4,000 within four years. It quickly earned a state prize for “Excellence in Exports”. In 1979, due to heavy debts, it sacked hundreds of workers. Around 180 of them staged a sit-in to demand compensation; police stormed the factory, and a 21-year-old protester died from beatings. Among the demonstrators was Kim Young-sam, a legislator who let them use his party’s offices. In 1993 he became South Korea’s first civilian president in the democratic era.

Kim Kyung-sook, the protester who died, was like millions of others who left the countryside in the 1970s for Seoul; she began factory work straight after primary school. Her wages, which she sent home, helped put her younger brother through secondary school. She often stitched wigs until 4am. One of her co-workers says they were “worked like machines”. Some became addicted to the stimulants that they were given to stay awake.

Part of the reason that YH closed was that the wig industry was growing new roots. In the 1980s, as South Korea grew richer and wages soared, plants were moved to China and South-East Asia.

In today’s South Korea, the ordeal of workers like Kim now seems other-worldly. The country’s GDP per person is roughly that of Italy; over two-thirds of its youngsters go to university. Democracy is entrenched; protests are routine. (In January a court cleared four YH protesters who had been prosecuted for those early demonstrations at the factory.) Yet South Koreans still lead stressful lives: they work among the longest hours in the rich world, at school and in the office. Local trichologists say that changing diets and air pollution also help to explain why a quarter of South Koreans are losing their hair.

In South Korea, products to combat hair loss have become a multi-billion-dollar market. Magnificent mops are a marker of professional success. A man was recently fired on his first day of work at a hotel after bosses uncovered his hair loss (he appealed to the country’s human-rights committee). Manufacturers have taken note: last year, to promote its wares, Hi-Mo offered free rentals of wigs or toupees to graduates for their job interviews. Women, shunning domesticity to stay longer in the workforce, have become new buyers.

Hi-Mo says the market is growing more luxuriant across a broad range of age-groups. Its sales have risen by over 40% since 2010, and its first-time buyers are becoming younger: over a quarter of its male users are in their 30s. Those whose custom Hi-Mo manages to secure often stick with the company’s hairpieces for a lifetime, it says. If used daily, they last about a year: in a country with one of the world’s longest life expectancies, that is a head-spinning prospect for wigmakers.