Rejoice 1980s, your style is the new cool

The soccer rocker. The hockey player. The neck warmer. The man do, can do. The zombie do. Tennessee top hat. The Missouri compromise.

The mullet is back.

Zoom meeting in the front, party in the back.

You might be thinking of Patrick Swayze in some 80s or 90s movie, but the mullet is really old. In the second century AD, the Greek god Apollo was sculpted with one.

Its modern birth was in the 1970s with David Bowie, Keith Richards, Rod Stewart, and other rock stars. By the 1980s, it was everywhere (think Billy Ray Cyrus), showing up in music videos, TV shows, movies (Chuck Norris!) hockey games, and Superman (1993).

It never really died. But it has been condemned, and not just by radio DJs and Jerry Springer viewers. Iran deemed it un-Islamic in 2010. North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-Un, on the cutting edge of fashion as always, also banned it as decadent — as opposed to his preference of desperate.

But why the return? The BBC blames COVID-19 for making people hibernate and thus letting their hair go. But celebrities everywhere are making the mullet statement with new short/long cuts.

While you will see some extreme mullets of earlier years with very short fronts and very long backs, many of today’s mullets are mistaken for shags.

According to Flare, a shag is more uneven all over the head, whereas the mullet is distinctly shorter in the front. A longer mullet actually can be grown out to be a shag.