Not just a place to do your hair: "A new exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York traces the development of the salon and showcases the women who ran them from Paris in the early 17th century to Hollywood in the 1940s when, the curators suggest, the taste for sociable, intellectual conversation in such domestic spaces died. Thereafter salons just became places where you got your hair done."
And just the other day I was lamenting the loss of salons after finishing Swann's Way (not that I want to be anywhere near Mme Verdurin, but still!).
