Revenge of the mullet

PARIS • "Business in front, party in the back" - a hairstyle considered so obnoxious that, for years, it verged on being an arrestable offence, the mullet has made the unlikeliest comeback of the century.

From pop stars like Rihanna and Miley Cyrus to a surprisingly high proportion of the England rugby team, the short-front-long-back style has reinvaded the world's television screens and high streets.

"My idols have always been (late music icon) David Bowie and Princess Diana, so the idea was to look like their lovechild," said Ms Sharon Daniels, 26, an Australian living in Brighton, England.

She was well ahead of the game, and when she arrived in Brighton two years ago, only one other person around town was sporting her do. She knew because people kept sending her pictures of him.

Now, the mullet is everywhere.

"I don't necessarily appreciate that, since now it looks like I'm trying to fit in," Ms Daniels said with a laugh. "I don't mind. I know how long I've been rocking it."

Fashion cycles are as inevitable as the turning of the planets, but this is one style many thought was buried for good.

"It's back from the dead," said Mr Tony Copeland of the British Master Barbers Alliance, theorising that a few months of lockdown growth helped propel the resurrection. "We're going to see more and more this year. Guys are just fed up with all the skin fades."

That could mean fierce competition at the next Festival de la Coupe Mulet, Europe's biggest mullet festival, last held in Belgium in 2019.

Current titleholder Gauthier Istin, a farmer from Brittany in northern France, is not worried about defending his crown.

For him, the mullet is a passport to good times, and he intends to travel by foot to the next festival in central France in June, like a sort of slower, hairier Forrest Gump.

"I hope people will walk with me along the way, ideally with a mullet, but no problem if not," he said.

He takes a philosophical view of his flowing locks: "It's about having enough confidence in yourself to not take yourself too seriously, and to totally own your look."

Mr Istin points out that the mullet dates back much further than the shoulder pads and rolled-up jacket sleeves of the 1980s.

"If you look at ancient frescoes, Roman mosaics, you'll see people with it because it's much simpler than other styles," he said.

Indeed, the History Channel says the mullet made its first appearance in literature in Homer's The Iliad, in which some spearmen are described as having "their forelocks cropped, hair grown long at the backs".

It also credits Benjamin Franklin's "skullet" (bald on top, long at the back) with helping to charm the French into supporting the nascent United States when he was ambassador in the 18th century. His daring, wig-less hairstyle was part of a successful public relations effort depicting him as a man of "simplicity and innocence".

Amazingly, however, the mullet went for millennia without a name. It was not christened until 1994, and by an unlikely source.

"You're coming off like you're Van Damme, you've got Kenny G in your Trans Am," the Beastie Boys rapped on their 1994 single Mullet Head - the first recorded use of the word according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

By that point, the mullet was well on its way to disrepute, moving out of magazine pages and into the truck stops of deep south America, often to be seen near an angry dog on a chain.

"It really became offensive in the 1990s," said Ms Deirdre Novella of Badlands salon in Brooklyn.

"It was for people stuck out in the woods with no idea what was happening."

Its survival in these outposts may have been as much about practicalities as aesthetics, saving necks from getting red and requiring minimal maintenance.

Ms Daniels said: "It's true that I don't get sunburnt, and I don't need to tie my hair up when I'm using a circular saw."

These are not the driving concerns for most mullet requesters at Ms Novella's salon, who tend to be LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) or "hardcore art" scenesters.

"You have to have some really radical style: the sort of people who wear clothes that don't look good, but they're so fashionable, they can pull it off," she said.

Still, the mullet has always looked tough and that will not change even after a million Brooklyn and Shoreditch hipsters Insta their two-tier cuts to ironic death.

Ms Daniels said: "I once found myself on a ferry to Tasmania with the Outlaws motorbike gang and the percentage of mullets was insane. It's just a bada** hairstyle."

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE