The mullet has no country of birth, and the word itself is barely thirty years old. Short at the front, long at the back is one of those solutions humans seem to keep arriving at independently, which maybe the point.

The evidence for the ancient version is patchy, so what is solid and what is folklore.

Here is what the sources give us:

• Ancient Greece. The first literary mullet seems to be in Homer’s Iliad, where the Abantes, spearmen, wear their hair cropped at the front and long at the back. Greek statues from the 6th century BCE are also often said to show the cut.

• Imperial Rome. Wikipedia cites Suetonius saying the emperor Tiberius wore his hair “rather long at the back”, a family habit.

• Byzantium, 6th century AD. The historian Procopius, in his Secret History, describes young hooligans backing the chariot-racing faction who cut their hair short at the front and left it long behind, the so-called “Hunnic” look. It was, in effect, a football-ultras haircut, 1,500 years early.

Why would it keep turning up? The practical logic is easy to see: keep the hair out of your eyes, keep the neck warm, and don’t give an enemy a handful of hair to grab. That is an interpretation, but it is exactly the sort of thing evolution-minded people find hard to resist.

And the word?

The name arrived late. “Mullet-head” was an American insult for a fool from at least the mid-1800s, and Mark Twain used it in Huckleberry Finn (1884). For the haircut, the Oxford English Dictionary credits the Beastie Boys, whose 1994 song “Mullet Head” turned an ironic joke into a name.

So: ancient haircut, brand-new name, and a name that began life as an insult. Hold that thought.

The famous mullets

The modern mullet was a rock-and-roll invention long before it was a joke. The sources agree on roughly this order of events:

• Tom Jones, 1965. Wikipedia notes him wearing one on The Ed Sullivan Show.

• David Bowie, 1972. The orange Ziggy Stardust cut is the usual starting gun. Hair historian Janet Stephens says it “pushed the margins of hair and dress”.

• Paul and Linda McCartney, 1973. A famous photo shows them in matching mullets. Rod Stewart is the other 1970s name that always comes up.

• The 1980s. MTV and Hollywood did the rest: Richard Marx, Patrick Swayze in Road House, Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon and Billy Ray Cyrus later became the face of the cut in the early 1990s.

• Later wearers. Jerry Seinfeld sported one on prime-time TV for years, and Brad Pitt is said to credit his Thelma & Louise audition cut. Scarlett Johansson and Rihanna have both gone mullet, and Dacre Montgomery’s Billy in Stranger Things sent people into salons.

The list moves. It starts with the coolest people on the planet and ends with men in tracksuits at the football. Nobody dropped the mullet. It slid down the status ladder.

How it became a joke

The 1980s peak saw the start of the fall. When a look is everywhere, it stops signalling anything, and then the wrong people start wearing it. It is thought that the decline is down to the cut being adopted by the trucker-hat-and-sandals crowd, with ridicule following close behind.

Then came the mockery. The Beastie Boys’ 1994 song is described there as the “death blow”, and the joke kept running: a 1998 song by the Vandals, the 2001 documentary American Mullet, and the early-2000s Joe Dirt films, cemented it as the “white trash” label. Mullet-wearers were no longer trendsetters.Mel Gibson cut his off in Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), the end of an era.

It is a classic case of a status signal working in reverse. Once the cut spreads beyond the group it flatters, the group abandons it.

The backlash even reached governments. Iran banned it in 2010 among a list of “decadent Western cuts”. A hairstyle banned by a state is, by definition, a hairstyle that means something.

The comeback

The revival didn’t arrive in one go. It crept back, first as irony and then, slowly, as sincerity.

• 2005. Young men in Moscow started adopting it.

• 2010 to 2015. Hockey’s “playoff mullet”, made famous by Patrick Kane, kept it alive in sport, followed by Phil Kessel, Mike Gundy and James Conner later in the decade

• 2019. Anna Sui’s autumn show put every model in a spiky, technicolour mullet wig, and the cut was on New York runways. After Stranger Things, one London stylist said she was cutting “at least one or two a week”

• 2020. i-D called it “the year of the mullet”, crediting lockdown and closed salons. Which seems about right: nothing grows a mullet like a pandemic.

• Since. The USA Mullet Championships began in 2020, and in 2023 Tami Manis of Tennessee received a Guinness World Record for a 172.72 cm mullet. Peso Pluma made it his signature in 2023, and the modern mullet has been a defining cut of 2026, typically paired with fades and tapers.

The new version is not the old one. The 1980s original was blow-dried and bouffant. Today’s is more often cropped, textured and tapered.

So what does the Mullet signal?

1. Class, sort of. The stereotype is real. The mullet became tied to the Bogan in Australia and New Zealand, to the Yinzer of western Pennsylvania, and to the “white trash” and “southern idiot” caricatures. But the history above shows it began in glam rock and on emperors, so “working class” is a reputation it acquired, not a birthright. Its modern revival, one writer argues, draws on “working-class style” and is knowingly borrowed by people who are not.

2. Rebellion. The mullet says “I don’t think like you do”, a deliberate embrace of bad taste. That fits the Iranian ban, and the thread running from Bowie to punk and skateboarding.

3. Gender and sexuality. Wikipedia notes the style became a public identifier in lesbian culture from the late 1980s, and described it as playing with gendered hair norms. Short on top, long behind: it won’t sit neatly in either category.

4. Tribe. Football casuals, hockey players, metalheads, skaters, miners’ towns like Kurri Kurri with its annual Mulletfest. Like any hairstyle, it is mostly a badge that says which group you belong to.

And the evolutionary angle? Hair is one of the cheapest, most visible signals a human can change. Dress it as the group does and you tell everyone whose side you’re on. That is also why a style is ruined when the wrong group adopts it: the signal changes meaning.

So what is the mullet really?

A cut that has been invented, abandoned and rediscovered for perhaps 2,500 years, worn by emperors, chariot-racing hooligans, glam-rock aliens, hockey players and the occasional bored Londoner in lockdown. Mocked for thirty years, then wanted again.

That is the real lesson. A haircut doesn’t carry a fixed meaning. It carries whatever the people wearing it, and the people judging it, agree it means. Sometimes that’s status, sometimes it’s rebellion, and sometimes it is simply a good solution to keeping your neck warm.

The answer is in a timer your genes set before you were born.

“My hair just won’t grow.” It isn’t quite true. Your hair is growing right now, at about a centimetre a month. What differs from person to person is how long each hair is allowed to keep going.

Three stages, one cycle

Every hair on your head follows the same cycle.

• Anagen is the growing phase. The follicle is working flat out, pushing out new hair. It lasts years.

• Catagen is a short transition of a few weeks. Growth stops and the follicle shrinks back.

• Telogen is the rest. The hair sits there for around three months, then falls out, and a new one starts underneath.

At any moment, roughly 85 to 90% of your scalp hairs are growing and the rest are resting or shedding. That’s why you lose a fair few hairs every day (50 to 100 is normal) without ever going bald. Each follicle runs on its own clock, so they don’t all fall out at once.

The 2 to 7 year timer

On the scalp, anagen lasts anywhere from about two to seven years. That’s the number that matters.

The sum is simple. A hair grows about 12 to 15 centimetres a year. Two years of growth gets you roughly shoulder length. Seven years gets you towards a metre. Your hair’s maximum length is its growth rate multiplied by the length of your growth phase. When the timer runs out, the hair falls out. It doesn’t matter how well you treat it or how many vitamins you take.

So two people can grow their hair at the same speed, with the same care, and one ends up with hair to her waist while the other’s stalls at her collarbones. Their hair isn’t growing differently. One has a seven-year timer and the other a two-year one.

What sets the timer

Mostly genes. One of the best-studied is FGF5, which makes a signal that tells a follicle to leave the growth phase. A strong signal means a short anagen and shorter hair. A weak one lets the hair keep growing. Researchers reported in 2014 that FGF5 is a crucial regulator of hair length in humans. The same idea shows up in animals: the long-haired Angora breeds of rabbits, cats and goats carry changes in the same gene.

Eyelashes show the timer clearly. They run on exactly the same cycle, but their growth phase lasts only weeks, so they stop at about a centimetre. Eyebrows and body hair are the same. We lost most of our body fur and kept the crown, and part of the story is that evolution left the scalp’s timer long and shortened the rest.

The world record shows what a long timer can do. Xie Qiuping’s hair was measured at 5.6 metres in 2004. At a normal growth rate that would take decades, and her follicles simply never got the message to stop at seven years.

Other things that move the number

• Age. The growth phase tends to shorten as we get older, so hair gets thinner and stops at shorter lengths.

• Hormones. In pregnancy, more hairs stay in the growth phase. After the birth many shed together, which is why new mothers often lose a lot at once.

• Stress and illness. A shock can push many follicles into the resting phase at once. The shedding shows up two or three months later.

• Breakage. This matters more than people think. The ends of long hair are old. Hair that’s 60 centimetres long is around four years old, and it has been brushed, heated, dyed and tied for that whole time. If it snaps off as fast as it grows, you’ll never gain length, whatever the timer says. Tightly coiled hair is more fragile at each bend, and it shrinks when dry, so a 30-centimetre strand can look a third of that. A lot of “my hair won’t grow” is really “my hair won’t keep its length”.

Averages differ between populations in some studies, but the spread within any group is far larger than the gap between them. Your timer is your own.

So what can you do?

You can’t lengthen your anagen. You can keep what you grow: cut less often only if the ends are healthy, go gently with heat and tight styles, and protect hair from friction. Short hair is no failure. It might just be a short timer.

Hair seems like the most personal thing about us, and it turns out to run on a clock we never set.

Say “the Rachel” to almost anyone of a certain age and they know exactly what you mean. No explanation needed. That is the real test of famous hair.

Hair becomes famous when it stops being personal and becomes public. It turns into a sign, something that can be recognised and repeated. And cultural memory is ruthless about what it keeps. It does not choose the most flattering styles. It chooses the clearest ones.

Elvis is the proof. The high black pompadour, the ducktail, the sideburns that grew longer as the career went on. Parents in the fifties worried about the hair almost as much as the hips. When he went into the army in 1958, the haircut was understood as a symbolic taming. The hair tracked the whole arc, from rebellion to iconography.

Bowie did the opposite. His hair was never consistent, and that was the point. Each reinvention arrived first as a haircut. The red, angular Ziggy told you something alien was coming before a note was played.

Then there is Jennifer Aniston, whose layered, highlighted cut on Friends went from screen to salon to street. Millions of women asking for it were not just ordering a haircut. They were reaching for an identity: effortless, relatable, warmly imperfect.

As someone who has spent more than thirty years in advertising, I find this fascinating. These are the best-performing brand assets ever created, and none of them were designed by a brand team. They work because they are distinctive, easy to recall and instantly legible.

Try this: Name a famous hairstyle without naming the person. If you can do it in three words, it has done the job. If you can’t, it hasn’t.

We are the odd ones out. Almost every other mammal wears a coat. We wear a crown.

Somewhere between one and two million years ago, our distant relative Homo erectus stood up, grew longer legs and shorter arms, and started walking and running for hours across the hot African savannah. That created a problem. Overheating.We are the odd ones out. Almost every other mammal wears a coat. We wear a crown.

The solution was clever. Lose the fur, so that sweat can evaporate and carry the heat away. Less body hair also meant fewer places for ticks, lice and fleas to live. A hairless body was a cooler, cleaner body.

But the scalp was different. It took the full force of the equatorial sun, so it kept its hair.

That is the biology, and it is only half the story. Because the moment we had a crown, we started doing things with it that have nothing to do with keeping cool. We shaped it. We covered it. We cut it off as a sign of devotion. We dyed it to say who we were.

And here is the part I find most interesting. The same genes that gave us this strange arrangement also gave us the enormous range of hair we see today: straight, wavy, curly and tightly coiled, in every colour. Each one is a small piece of evolutionary history, carried on our heads.

So, the next time you look in the mirror, remember what you are looking at. Two million years of adaptation, sitting on top of your skull.

Somewhere between one and two million years ago, our ancestors lost most of their body hair. We kept a bit on our heads, a bit on our faces, and a few other places we’ll get to. And we’ve been making a fuss about what was left ever since.

Biology explains part of it. It doesn’t explain why people have been shaved, shamed, wigged, dyed, curled, covered and crowned over it. Ask a rabbi and you’ll hear about modesty. Ask a historian and you’ll hear about power. Ask a hairdresser and you’ll hear about confidence. They’re all right.

That’s the idea behind Hair-Brained. It’s a book about why hair matters so much to us, told through 27 chapters on evolution, religion, art, gender, politics, fashion, punishment, photography, technology and loss. Each chapter has my take, and most have a second voice from someone who knows far more than I do: historians, scientists, hairdressers and faith leaders.

So why me? I work in marketing, and I’ve spent a good part of my career around hair brands. A brand is what you get when you take an old human instinct and put a price on it. I got curious about the instinct.

The book is due out next year. In the meantime, I’ll be sharing here:

• stories from the chapters, from why we lost our fur to why red hair was mocked

• conversations with the experts who helped

• the messy business of getting a book made

• the odd hair story from the news

If that sounds like your sort of thing, subscribe below. [Optional: add your welcome gift here, for example “I’ll send you the evolution chapter to start with”.]

And here’s a small challenge. Next time you look in the mirror, ask yourself why you do what you do with your hair. Then reply and tell me. With your permission, the best answers might end up in the book.