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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Mr. Mullet is making small talk with White Trash Mafia Wife, a larger-than-life bottle-blond diva in head-to-toe black, who has peroxided her hair until it practically glows in the dark and has teased it up on top of her head in a gravity-defying ponytail. Very Ivana Trump, circa 1989, with an echo of Sharon Stone in "Casino."
Sitting on the velvet-upholstered bench nearby is a British hipster with a vaguely '80s porn star mustache -- a thin little black caterpillar nestled narrowly atop his lip -- and layered long black hair. His friend sports a modified mod shag brushed forward onto his face, looking like a refugee from 1970s London. And then there are the men with Afros, three of them, in cookie-cutter hooded sweat shirts and sneakers and vintage tops, each one sporting a bigger head of teased-out curls than the next.
"Being fashionable is really conforming to the current or popular style. This is easy and can be quite boring; just look in a magazine or walk into Banana Republic. Then there are the people who seem to always be one step ahead -- the trendsetter," says Brian, he of the '70s London shag. "Most observers of the 'trendsetter' will think the trendsetter's style is a bit off or 'unfashionable.' But that's a good thing."
The mullet, for example, has spent much of the past year making an admirable comeback -- although the word "comeback" implies that the mullet was once fashionable, which isn't actually the case. Best known as the hairstyle of redneck hicks, South American soccer players, '80s country stars and butch lesbians, the STLB haircut suddenly boasts an entire movement of otherwise fashionable fans.
Communiqué
Girl Scouts go Starbucks. Plus: Put a sock in it.
By Carina Chocano
The resurgence began with a coffee-table book -- "The Mullet: Hairstyle of the Gods" -- and an army of fan sites devoted to mullet spotting. The hairstyle starred in an episode of MTV's "The Real World" when Matt, one of the show's preciously self-aware youths, took a video camera on a "mullet hunt" around New Orleans, proclaiming that "the mullet is quite possibly the coolest haircut known to mankind. Business in the front, party in the back."
This was, of course, all done in the name of post-millennial irony; Matt the Mullet Hunter would himself never cut his hair into a mullet (though he did bleach it blond and crop it into a hideous spiky crown). For most devotees of the mullet, public adoration of this hairstyle is merely a wink-wink, nudge-nudge indicator of cool, just as teen skate punks might admire the Afro but would never have the guts to grow their curls out. The Matts of the world would rarely go so far as to get the actual haircut; instead, they prefer to sit in safety on the sidelines and express their self-satisfied ennui from a distance. Only the most confidently fashionable would actually get an ugly white trash haircut.
And in recent months, the über-fashionistas have done just that. As the mullet's star rose in the past year, as hairstylists, rock stars and independent-movie icons adopted the hairstyle, it transitioned from joke to fashion statement. "Requiem for a Dream" star (and occasional Cameron Diaz boyfriend) Jared Leto was one of the first: In recent photos, you can catch Leto's mullet flowing, feathery and light, down his back, a gentle Marlo Thomas flip with a choppy white trash fringe. The lanky front strands -- parted dead-center on his skull -- frame his face with short bleach-tipped wings. He looks like an extra from "Heavy Metal Parking Lot"; naturally, he was immediately granted a fashion spread in Nylon.
