This is an announcement that the fashion forward never thought
they'd have to make. More feared than the returns of bell-bottoms,
fluorescent pink leg warmers and even, dare we say it, culottes, is
this - the return of a hairstyle so ridiculed that it launched a
mocking TV show, a book and even a movie.
The mullet is back.
Still long in the back, and short on the top and the sides, the
modern mullet is being worn by hipsters in New York and was even
worn by Dixie Chick Natalie Maines at her summer concert in
Philadelphia. Now, the trend has reached the scissors of stylists
across America and in the Valley.
"They're back, so back I can't even say how back they are," says
Ethan Murray, owner of E's Urban Hair in Phoenix, who has been
giving his more daring clients mullets for a few weeks now.
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It's more layered now, a little "chunkier" of a cut, Murray says.
And it's called something different - "disconnected hair" - to
disguise it, he says, to make people less afraid.
And for good reason: the mullet's place in pop culture right now
exists on two levels - at this elite, hipster top tier, and at the
bottom of the barrel. People live to mock the mullet - the clichéd
hairstyle of Billy Ray Cyrus, Michael Bolton and hockey players all
over the country is the star of a new TV show, The Mullets,
which pokes fun of longhaired America on network UPN. Mullet mania
is also now a coffee-table book (The Mullet: Hairstyle of the
Gods
(LINK)) sold at hipper-than-thou chain Urban Outfitters. And in
2001, understanding the mullet was the subject of a movie, The
Mullet Chronicles, hilarious in its exploration of mullets
across America.
This kind of mullet, the one our own Diamondback Randy Johnson even
wore for a while, has its own groupies - mullet hawks - people who
travel to likely mullet-spotting locations (Wal-Mart, trailer parks
and Indiana being a choice stereotyped few), take pictures and post
them on the Internet. In a different category: those who try to
touch these mullets, which often makes the mullet-wearer mad. A
favorite bit of mullet trivia: One of the very first mullets was
actually worn by Napoleon.
Heidi Kurash of Phoenix just got her first mullet last week.
"I love it, I totally do," says the 33-year-old bathroom designer.
"I was really, at first, intimidated by the idea, 'cause I'm
thinking, like, 'mullet.'
"But I totally am having fun with it," she says. " It doesn't look
like a mullet to me at all."
Cheri Soto cringes when people call her disconnected hair a mullet -
even though it is.
The Flagstaff 28-year-old got hers two weeks ago, courtesy Murray,
and says proudly that she's the first person in Flagstaff to sport
this look.
"It's fabulous. I love it," Soto says. "I call it 'the
disconnected,' because my mom said, 'It's nice, it looks good on
you, it looks like a mullet,' and I got freaked out.
"When I hear that word I get totally freaked out."
