The other day, I heard my seventeen-year-old son say a phrase I never thought I’d hear: The mullet’s back in style. And he was going to grow one.
I couldn’t believe this, especially after the traumatic parenting moment when he was in third grade and I accidentally gave him a mullet. Parenting aint’ for sissies!
When the “incident” happened, I wasn’t “properly” qualified to cut his hair in the first place, but had been doing it for a long time, because he refused to go to a salon or a barbershop. His first haircut at a salon when he was two years old went okay. He was cautious, suspicious, but allowed the new experience.
The second time, he would have none of it. We’d gone to a salon for kids to make the experience friendlier, try to give it a “fun factor.” They had snacks, and my son had his choice of sitting in a car, a motorcycle or on an elephant, all plastic moldings around the salon chairs. The answer was a resounding get-me-out-of-here NO! He headed towards the door.
I tried comforting, cajoling, waiting, bribing, sweet-talking, reasoning, forcing. Nothing worked. Sweating—with his baby brother fidgeting in a BABYBJÖRN on my chest—we finally just left.
His hair grew.
So, I bought barber scissors and became my children’s stylist. When money was tight and my husband’s regular hair-cutter moved away, I became his barber too. I had never cut hair before in my life! Except just before a high school junior prom when I decided to trim my bangs and, with my forehead crinkled, cut them into a short fringe that looked like the edge of pillow or like legs on a millipede or like I’d burned off the edges by mistake. It was bad, like a teenage horror movie—screams, tears, and no way out. Luckily, the dance was at the rival high school and not my own.
And with that experience behind me, suddenly I had to cut other people’s hair!
But I’m a good monkey. I did my best to imitate the way my stylist layered my hair. The family developed a routine. The “customer” got to choose the show on television of their choice and with a towel on the living room floor below a chair and another towel draped around them, I went at it.
Most of the cuts came out okay. Not perfect, but cute and passable. When my younger son wanted a buzzcut, I bought electric clippers and learned how to use them by trial and error. The three-quarter inch attachment was much better by far than the almost bald third-of-an-inch attachment. It was like a trust exercise. And sometimes I couldn’t believe they were trusting me! Lots of deep breaths and silent self-belief chants took place while on the television screen on the other side of the room Candace sang “Squirrels in my pants” on Phineas and Ferb.
Then came THE MULLET.
Tim_Lincecum. Wikisports
My son had chosen his TV show—it might have been a Myth Busters—sat in the chair, and I started trimming the hair over his forehead. He has gorgeous straight brown hair, and it had gotten long. I always asked the family ahead of time if they wanted any special kind of cut—hoping they would say no. Maybe it was because he was absorbed in his show or he just hadn’t thought of it. I was well into the trimming and layering in the front when he declared, “I want hair like Tim Lincecum.”
Tim Lincecum in 2009, wikimedia. cc
“The pitcher for the Giants?” I asked, already despairing as I pulled out my phone to look at photos of the baseball superstar (this was in around 2013). In most photos, Lincecum was, of course, wearing a baseball cap, but in almost every photo, very visible behind his ears and falling onto his neck and shoulders was his long locks. I looked at my son’s hair, already cut short in front.
“Um, I’ve already started cutting, but I’ll try.”
I left the back long at his request.
That evening when my husband saw our son, he pulled me aside laughing. “You gave him a mullet.”
I looked at our boy. It was true. I had just given him the most grossly out-of-fashion haircut a young man could have at the time. I was mortified.
Mullets in 2013 were taboo, an embarrassment, associated with a stereotype of “backwater ignorance” and cheesy 80s television B-actors.
If our son wore a hat like Lincecum, it might’ve looked okay, but he never wore hats, refused to. As a baby, I had dressed him in hats all the time, for fashion, sun or to keep him warm. I love hats. But when he was not yet one-year old, his aunt thought it would be funny to teach him how to take his own hat off his head. Except in the snow and at baseball games, he didn’t wear another one for almost sixteen years. (When she had a son of her own, she apologized profusely. It’s funny family lore now.)
The next day when my son went to school, a couple other parent-friends teased me as well, but luckily his third-grade buddies knew nothing of these social judgments. And it didn’t take long for his hair to grow. Thank god.
Zendaya with a great mullet
But time ticks on. The style referred to as “the haircut that's business up front and a party in the back” is in style once again, with a millennial flair. Zendaya, Scarlett Johansson, Taraji Henson, Rihanna, and Dolly Parton have all recently donned a modified mullet. The trend has a positive association once again.
The mullet is actually nothing new. According to Alan Henderson, author of the book Mullet Madness!, the “neck blanket” goes way back to Neolithic times. It’s a highly functional way to keep hair, if you think about it, providing warmth in the back and visibility in the front. Ancient Greeks and Romans rocked the mullet, evidenced by statues from the day. In the 16th century, Hittite warriors sported them, along with the Assyrians and the Egyptians. Native Americans wore mullet mohawks long before punk rockers. Benjamin Franklin felt pretty groovy, wearing his “skullet,” bald on top and long in the back, while moon bathing and harnessing the power of lightning. (There’s a great brief history of the mullet by Oliver Lunn on Dazed Beauty.)
David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust look
Fast-forward to the 1960s, and the “Alabama Waterfall” hit pop culture with the look of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the mullet became a common cut, especially iconic on Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. I had a dreadful lion-mane mullet for a while in 1985, a cut I got while living in London.
Being the frequent style of hockey players, the style earned the nickname “Hockey Hair.” It’s also been called the “Tennessee Tophat,” the “Achy-breaky-bad-mistakey,” and the “Soccer rocker.” Others refer to the mullet as “The MacGuyver” and “The Billy-Ray,” for obvious reasons. (Billy’s daughter Miley took on the cut and made it her own in this decade.) The Beastie Boys’ 1994 classic Mullet Head kept the style popular in the early 1990s.
Macgyver. Wikipedia
Then came the bust years when the mullet became the topic of comedy and ridicule, as in this routine by Jim Gaffigan in 2014.
The same thing happened to disco. Wildly fun and popular in the late 1970s and early ’80s, it was viewed as a joke for nearly 30 years, until it came back into musical style, the Disco Pop Revival or “Modern Disco.” It’s like classic and Neo-classic architecture. Same style, only with different tools, materials, flair and time period.
Trends are like this. Bellbottoms and headbands, legwarmers and saddle shoes, denim jackets and bucket hats, high-waisted jeans, tight jeans, baggy jeans. They all had their unacceptable years and then, viewed with nostalgia, were seen again 20 to 30 years later. There’s generational changes and the influence of designers taking inspiration from styles their parents wore, among other factors. We like to romanticize the past, us humans.
The harsh criticism of styles perhaps has to do with the natural rebellion of youth, which is a step towards independence. There’s also peer pressure, that precarious dance we humans do on the edge of conformity to belong and differentiating as individuals. I’d like to believe, with the advent of social media, there is more freedom for individual style and expression today than in the past. But the social and sociological pressures of us humans is pretty much the same. So that same social media can also add to the pressure to “keep up with the Joneses” with the influences of Tik-Tok, Instagram, Snapchat and memes. And we humans still have the same tendency to pre-judge, categorizing experiences and people being a survival tool that can easily go too far, becoming stereotyping and prejudice, scapegoating even. Our tendencies require awareness and examination so they don’t get the better of us, so that kindness (towards ourselves and others) can prevail.
So I think it’s safe to say: Beware the criticism of a good trend! Because chances are, even if it seems unlikely, it’s coming back at some point. Like the mullet, a.k.a. the Camaro Cut, the Ape Drape, the Beaver Paddle. All it takes is influential people to wear it with confidence.
Of course, some hair stylists will tell you that the mullet never actually went out of style. “Mullets are the best. Super versatile. (They give) a lot of movement with a little length still attached. They never really went out!" said Dante Pronio, master stylist at Mizu New York salon, who added that he still creates them under the pseudonym of a "tri-level" cut. (Today.com)
I personally like that the mullet is back in popular favor. It helps me rid the negative connotations I had associated with it. It reminds me to reserve my own judgment.
But I’m still not getting one. It would NOT be flattering on me.