A week ago, at the train station, four boys aged about 15, in matching uniforms, buffeted past me. Childless, I have minimal contact with rambunctious teens; small and easily knocked over, I’ve learned to cower in their presence when I do. Not this time! “Oh my god!” I blurted, staring in shock at their bobbing heads as they departed: “They’ve all got mullets!”
Yes, I know that modern history’s most infamous hairstyle has made its comeback; hair historians believe the hairdresserlessness of pandemic lockdowns liberated many a household barber from both scrutiny and shame. Last year its post-pandemic popularity was reported in the media as an amusing fad. Twelve more months have passed and it’s still here … and it’s completely freaking me out.
My reaction dates me with precision. I was a child during the mullet’s most aggressive previous popularity, back in the 1980s. Hair cut short at the front and sides but kept long at the neck was avant-garde in the 70s when David Bowie and Rod Stewart did it, but by the 80s “business at the front, party at the back” was the style de rigueur, adopted by teen heartthrobs from a pre-sex-tape-scandal Rob Lowe to a pre-Jesus Kirk Cameron … and then by just about everyone. Hulk Hogan and Andre Agassi had them. Australian pop-singer Brian Mannix and pop-footballer Warwick Capper were defined by the haircut as if obliged hosts of a demonic bargain. Mel Gibson’s performance in the Lethal Weapon movie franchise was 90% his hair.
So generationally definitive was the ’do was that by the time I’d grown into an actual teenager in the 1990s, the mullet was not merely out of fashion, it was an invitation to social ostracism on your scalp, the barnet of Cain. You’d rather cut off your head than cut your hair into it. In 1997 – the memory burns so deep – a committed contrarian peer replaced his newly shorn dreadlocks with an “ironic” mullet; his friends hesitated to appear with him in public, his girlfriend refused to root him. It was gone again in four days.
I can only presume that the leadership of the Catholic Emmanuel college high school Melbourne are also my age because last month their administration deemed the hairstyle as “excessive”. Then – along with other potential generational aesthetic markers like tattoos, makeup, fake nails, nail polish, false eyelashes and extensions – they banned it. The students responded with a somewhat bemused open letter, decrying the ban for “the lack of impact” their self-presentation “has on their education and behaviour in school”.
And as much as my aesthetic instinct is to fight the mullet with the enthusiasm of punishing the villain in an Eric Roberts movie, I’m with the kids.
The universal experience of adolescence is to have your life choices dictated not merely by others but by another generation. Hair has ever been a site of self-expression because it is an immediately accessible front for seizing at personal control. It’s one of the reasons why head-shaving rituals are endemic to military traditions. The “induction cut” of the US army has the psychological purpose of establishing the shearing away of self as one is subsumed into the corps and made entirely subject to command.
Today’s US soldiers, at least, have volunteered for the uniform; teenagers have not. Crowdsourcing histories of teen hair rebellion from my cohort on Facebook, I was reminded of the brief late-80s high school vogue for a “waterfall” perm. “Wanted to look like Kylie,” wrote my high school bestie, “actually looked like Craig.” Out also came the testimonies of a shared misspent post-punk hair youth – the teased and matted blue-black bouffants worn above crayon-thick black eyeliner, sometimes with wedges of unstable, unnatural bright colours that stained every pillowcase within a thousand-mile radius. I, for one, spent a significant chunk of my late teens with long, lank unbrushed tresses dyed an unforgivable shade of burgundy, affecting a look I can only describe as performative anaemia. The memory returns of my mother wondering aloud if I were iron-deficient, and my grandmother shuffling towards me with a flinty glare and a plastic comb.
The desire to suppress aesthetics that revolt us may be instinctive, but, Nanna, it’s doomed to failure and, Emmanuel college, it’s unimaginative and dull. The generational clash of aesthetics is something we should celebrate as a social achievement – and not tweely, as some adorable a rite-of-passage or amusing coming-of-age. Different aesthetics demonstrate a different paradigm for decision-making, a social perspective that evolves as new preferences are chosen. Among the rebels there are rebels, too. A friend’s teenage son is having a hard time among peers with whom he shares no desire to conform. I asked him how popular the mullet was at school; “Oh, they’ve all got them,” he sneered – not from under a replica of his father’s haircut, but a striking, slick side-parted version of a 1940s matinee idol’s, like none of the other kids are wearing.
You don’t think so much about being a teenager when you are one. You do when you’re middle aged. Haggard with rain – perhaps – and struggling with too many bags on a wet station platform while a pack of them bound from a train, you may experience a strange observational paradox. The closer your proximity to teenagers, the further away from them you suddenly realise you are.
They are not like us, these kids. Thank god, these kids are not like us.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
