Beauty Flashback: Billie Holiday's flower-filled hair

Widely renowned as one of the greatest jazz vocalists of all time, Billie Holiday had a stunning voice, whose smoky tones and raw emotion still cause a pricking at the back of the eyes and a lump in your throat nearly seventy years on.

Holiday complemented her showstopping stage performances with a standout trademark beauty look - white gardenias pinned in her hair. What a sight she must have been, standing in the spotlight with a spray of white blooms tucked behind her ear, glowing brightly against her gleaming black hair.

Despite lacking formal training and never learning how to read music, her undeniable musical talent means she is still held as a singing gold standard, and her beauty signature still provides inspiration for countless would-be icons.
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Flashback
While her on-stage look of hair garlanded with gardenias became her trademark, it came about by accident. Rumour has it that Holiday burned her hair with curling tongs one evening, just before she was due to take the stage. One of her fellow performers remembered that a neighbouring venue sold flowers at the cloakroom, so she nipped off and came back brandishing a bunch of the white blooms, which Holiday then pinned in her hair. Holiday liked her emergency hair cover-up so much that from then on, she would be rarely seen on-stage sans gardenia.

Her penchant for the flowers did lead to blood being spilt on one occasion, at her sold-out Carnegie Hall show in 1948. According to her autobiography, she was sent a box of gardenias, which she secured to her head without a second thought. Unbeknownst to her, there was a hatpin in amongst the flowers that, having cut the side of her head, made her pass out at the end of her third curtain call.

From The Telegraph