A Crown of Irony

The mullet is trending. God help us.

Mullets are the big thing right now. So says T, the New York Times style magazine insert, which reports that the hairstyle has been trending on Instagram and Tik Tok and that Lil Nas X, Rihanna, Billie Eilish and Miley Cyrus have all gone ‘business up front, party in the back.’ 

Mullets are now come il faut among everyone from English public school boys to inhabitants of Brooklyn’s most fashionable quarters. Mulleted models have walked the runways for all the top  design houses, including Alexander McQueen, Junya Watanabe and Stella McCartney.

When am I getting mine you ask? Not soon enough! 

Wait, I’m missing punctuation in that last sentence. What I mean is: Not soon. Enough!

It’s not that I don’t like mullets. Becks here and Billie Eilish both have nice ones, though neither are very mulletish. They’re calling this a mullet but to me it’s more of a soft shag redolent of 70s rocker chicks like Suzie Quatro or Chrissie Hynde… 

For the most part though mullets are kind of a practical joke, amiright? They’re a sight gag in comedies, including Joe Dirt, East Bound and Down and Wayne’s World. It’s the hair-style equivalent of the Chevy El Camino and the El Camino is the mullet of the automotive world. 

Growing up in late 70s/early 80s suburban Calgary, mullets and El Caminos were cool among the headbangers, wasters and greasers. In those days, the haircut that couldn’t make up its mind was a metaphor for the ‘grasping goofball’ archetype—the loserish striver planning to one day pull his act together, buy a clip-on tie and get a job in his uncle’s waterbed emporium. That or sell Amway from the trunk of his Buick Skylark. 

Personally, I’d rather not wear a joke on my head. Unless it’s one of these…

I wonder what it says about our era that the hottest hair trend gets me thinking about rubber puke or Whoopee cushions. My suspicion is… nothing good. 

A lot of the mullet coverage in the fashion press highlights two historical high-water marks. The first is when David Bowie debuted his orange version in 1972, alongside his alter ego Ziggy Stardust. The other is now. Too bad for the in-betweeners—the trailer park deplorables who’ve been wearing the style for years. I could almost imagine them, for one fleeting moment, finally feeling ‘seen’ by snobby coastal media elites. Sorry rednecks, they only care about mullets on celebrities and Bushwick hipsters with $200 k in art school debt. 

It seems as though there are Red State mullets and Blue State mullets. If the fashion arbiters of the New York Times cared about Red State mullets, they would have sent a reporter to a Walmart in Pensacola or a Monster Truck event. The Red State mullet is earnest. The Blue State mullet is ironic—IE: devoid of passion and sincerity—and referential. Wear one and you’re in on the joke. You get it. 

At the moment, the ultimate Blue State mullet belongs to influencer and Kamala Harris stepdaughter Ella Emhoff. According to a recent profile in Vogue, the Second Stepdaughter chose the mullet for her pandemic haircut because it’s “considered unattractive and kind of odd, and I’m really drawn to that almost ‘ugly-chic’ look.” 

Ouch! Another blow to the life-long mullet-wearer! Your mullet is ugly! Oh wait… the word ‘chic’ is tacked on at the end and by a recent Parsons School of Design grad no less. One with a modeling contract at IMG, NYC’s most prestigious agency, whom the fashion press has coronated the style icon helping to define kitsch youth fashion for the rest of the world. Judging by some of her recent designs, ‘ugly’ is clearly no longer a pejorative…

Muccia Prada basically invented the ‘ugly chic’ counter-aesthetic in 1996 with a pret-a-porter collection that confronted fashion’s preference for ‘elegant’ and ‘feminine.’ The colour pallette was sombre brown, avocado and ochre and the patterns inspired by 1970s appliances. At the time, Vogue described the collection as “either terribly pretty or pretty terrible…” 

My friend Jenna, who’s a stylist and makeup artist, described it as “Gladys Ormphby,” Ruth Buzzie’s crabby old spinster character on Laugh In. Jenna also recalled how, that same year, the other designer du jour Tom Ford was embracing something completely opposite. Vogue described Ford’s collection as the “fashion equivalent of a one-night stand at Studio 54…”

How auspicious Tom Ford’s collection looks in retrospect. How lovely and sexy but also ambitious. Sadly, according to Jenna, “Gen-Z is in no mood for Tom Ford’s aspirational ethos these days. Can you blame them? What do these kids have to feel ambitious about? Locked out of the housing market, their crypto and NFT investments hollowed out and a looming recession, they can’t afford all that bias-cut silk and drapey cotton velvet.” Apparently there’s no need since they can hobble together Ella Emhoff’s look from the $5 reject basket at Value Village. 

To give them their due, unlike those coastal media elites, GenZ is not snobby. Talk to any of them and you’re generally astounded by how nice they are, especially compared to my irascible fellow GenXers. They’re not mocking the deplorables. They’re just feeling anxious and a little defeated. It’s possible, under the current circumstances, Tom Ford’s Halston-inspired slinky, silky creations look less auspicious and more ‘try hard,’ which is a cardinal sin among this cohort. Projecting an air of hopelessness probably a) feels more honest and b) is less likely to be ridiculed.

Tom Ford’s aesthetic has, for this generation, another strike against it: it’s unmistakably feminine. Go around looking that sexy and the next thing you know, you’ll be procreating. Who wants that? Bad for the planet! Because if mullets and the rest of the ‘ugly chic’ paradigm are one thing, it’s gender neutral. The mullet is one of maybe two fundamentally gender fluid hairstyles. The other is the afro. The difference is that the afro is gender neutral. The mullet is gender neutralizing—it makes boys more feminine and girls more masculine. It is a magnetic draw to the centre of the feminine-masculine spectrum, which is exactly where GenZ aims to be. Naturally, T magazine mentions this:

“Perhaps the mullet elicited such strong reactions because it refuses to be any one thing, sitting at the midpoint between long and short, masculine and feminine and tasteful and tacky. But if an inability to categorize causes discomfort in some, this sort of in-betweenness is just what some are looking for, especially at a time when gender and taste both feel, rightfully and crucially, so fluid.”

I asked Jenna if it was just me or is there something creepy in those words ‘rightful’ and ‘crucial.’ “It’s non-negotiable get it? Like a uniform or a technocrat’s utopian fantasy. Or Mao’s Red Guard. There is no gender and everyone must dress the same.”

Not everyone apparently. Haley Bieber, for example, manages to look ‘in’ with gender-fluid boxy blazers, bike shorts, oversized sweatshirts, sneakers and shredded high-waister jeans. But, according to Jenna, she manages to embrace her feminine side. Here she is channeling Tom Ford’s 90s ‘corporate vamp’ archetype… 

What a difference! One looks like she stepped out of a Virginia Slims ad or a TV spot for Enjoli perfume. She’s the second-wave feminist mankiller, taking home the bacon, frying it up in the pan, etc. The other puts me in mind of Serena Joy, Commander Waterford’s wife in The Handmaid’s tale. I think you can guess which one.