Singer Miley Cyrus sporting a flowing mullet earlier this year. Her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, made the hair-do legendary back in the 1990s.
Photo: Getty Images
JEREMY FLEMING has a mullet. And it’s fine by him if you chuckle at it. “It’s a pretty dark time we’re going through, I thought [the mullet] was a good opportunity to make people laugh,” said Mr. Fleming, who handles communications for the local government in Lakewood, Colo. A few weeks into his period of social distancing, Mr. Fleming grabbed the clippers and sheared his mushrooming mop into a swooping mullet, the peculiar long-in-the-back, short-in-the-front style that has a certain infamy. Now, when he and his family go for walks, neighbors snicker at his “Joe Dirt”-like locks. Mission accomplished: levity.
For many Americans, self-isolation has led to questionable at-home haircuts like the patchy buzz and the uneven bowl-cut. But the chop-job of the moment that’s both most provocative and likely to endure might be the Covid-Mullet. The mullet, which has been around for centuries, has come and gone over time: Samoset, the American Indian who made contact with colonists in 1621, reportedly had a mullet-like haircut. The style’s last peak was in the ’90s when Ellen Degeneres and country stars like Tim McGraw proudly sported mullets. The term itself was popularized by the Beastie Boys’s 1995 song “Mullet Head,” which called out clichés that often go hand-in-hand with a mullet—like American cars, stonewashed jeans and “names like Billy Ray.” But the events of 2020 have set the stage for a revival.
With barbershops closed under state orders, people by default let their hair grow long. When their thatches became intolerable, some rejected the predictable DIY buzzcut and chose instead to sculpt their locks into a comically proportioned ’do a la the hairstyle of ’80s Patrick Swayze. Among them is Blake Shelton, the esteemed country singer and a coach on “The Voice,” who posted a video of his girlfriend Gwen Stefani stroking his “quarantine mullet” on Twitter in late March, spurring his followers to tweet a deluge of laughing-face emojis.
“During this pandemic it just seems like everybody’s looking for a reason to have a sense of humor,” said Seth Hamed, 53, an investor in Baltimore, Md., who runs “Mullet Mavens,” a 5-year-old Facebook page dedicated to tracking mullets past and present. The mullet, he said, “gives people a smile.”
Grant Winkels, 28, a stand-up comedian in Minneapolis, has amused his friends and followers online by broadcasting his new mullet on Instagram over the past few weeks. “It’s probably just attention-seeking behavior,” he admitted, but several of his friends have also adopted the mullet as a “why not?” experiment during this period of relative solitude, when one’s appearance gets less public scrutiny and the stakes are lower.
Even some men with professional jobs that now require hours of Zoom calls have found a way to embrace the mullet. “You can kind of tuck the mullet growth in and do your conference call and you look quite normal to people,” said Adam Roberts, 39, who works for an energy company in Ontario, Canada. In April he gave himself and his 11-year-old son mullet cuts as a family inside-joke. ”We’re in a really tough time and it just adds a little bit of entertainment,” he explained.
But will the “modern mullet” endure post-pandemic? There’s some evidence the mullet was already waging a quiet if spotty comeback pre-coronavirus. Eric Decker, a barber in New Jersey, has cut a slew of mullets in the five years he’s been running his shop. Many of the mullet-adoptees, he said, were inspired by the Chicago Blackhawks’s Patrick Kane, whose hair cascades conspicuously from the back of his helmet. And most of the freshly mulleted men I spoke with were enamored enough of their new cuts that they were at least willing to try to carry them into a post-Covid world.
Chicago Blackhawks right wing Patrick Kane has recently helped to repopularize the mullet. His cascades conspicuously out the back of his helmet.
Photo: Getty ImagesEach had his own helmet-hair icon. For Mr. Winkels it was Theo Von, a Los Angeles-based comedian with a ’90s “Seinfeld”-esque mullet, while Mr. Roberts said that country singer Morgan Wallen was the first man he spotted with a modern mullet.
Once you start looking for them, modern mullets are everywhere. Channeling her father Billy Ray Cyrus during his ’90s heyday, singer Miley Cyrus has had a wavy blonde mullet for months; when out of drag, Crystal Methyd, a contestant on the latest season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” brandishes a curiously curly mullet; and it would impossible to discuss the mullet without mentioning Joe Exotic, the scandal-stoking star of Netflix’s “Tiger King,” with his signature multi-layered, platinum blonde mullet.
The range of mullets in the pop-culture sphere reflects this hairstyle’s broad appeal. “It’s kind of the one haircut that seems to run the spectrum for every kind of person,” said Mr. Decker, who has cut mullets on everyone from unabashedly patriotic he-men (“’Murica guys”) to left-leaning artistes. He likened the mullet of today to the beard in the early-2000s, just before it went mainstream. “Some Brooklyn coffee-roasting hipster guys and then some ‘Duck Dynasty’ guys both had the same gigantic beard,” he said. After it caught on with those two disparate groups, the beard went mass. Perhaps the micro mullet-bubble of 2020 is just the beginning of a full-blown renaissance.
Write to Jacob Gallagher at Jacob.Gallagher@wsj.com
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