Monday, March 24, 2008

Mullet - Defined

Mullet (haircut)
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An example of a wavy-hair-mullet.
A mullet is a hairstyle that is short in the front, top, and sides, but long in the back (also referred to by a number of other names, some regional, including hockey hair, ten ninety, millennium mullet, helmet hair, coupe Longueuil, etc.). It is also described as "business in the front, party in the back." The hairstyle was popular during the late 20th Century, from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. Mullets have been worn by males and females of all ages. The mullet is distinct from the rattail, which consists of a long, narrow "tail" of hair growing from the back of the head.From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE

According to urban legend, the mullet dates back to the 19th century, when fishermen wore their hair long in the back to keep warm — hence the term mullet. The Notes section of the Viking edition of Lydia Davis's translation of Swann's Way by Proust states "Jean Baptiste Prosper Bressant was a well-known actor who introduced a new hairstyle, which consisted of wearing the hair in a crew cut in front and longer in the back.
The mullet became popular in the 1970s, due in part to the influence of glam rock artist David Bowie, who wore the haircut during his Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs phases. Women also wore the style — Florence Henderson, a star of the sitcom The Brady Bunch, has a mullet in the opening sequence from the show's 1973–1974 season. The hairstyle achieved further popularity in the late 1970s and 1980s among entertainers with receding hairlines such as Anthony Geary of "Luke and Laura" fame from the soap opera General Hospital, and the pop performers Michael Bolton and Phil Collins.
In the 1980s, the mullet became big and bouffant, and bemulleted men often indulged in other 1980s hair crazes such as spiked hair and blonde highlights. A wide range of mullets can be seen in the 1984 video of "Do They Know It's Christmas", featuring many of the biggest British pop stars of the time. An exemplary popular mullet-man was Richard Dean Anderson in the '80s TV series MacGyver, as well as Mark Cordier and Jon Schliep.

In the early 1990s, country singer Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy Breaky" mullet fostered both imitation and ridicule.
The Beastie Boys 1994 song "Mullet Head" made fun of the hairstyle, and a year later band member Mike D discussed the mullet at length in issue 2 of the band's Grand Royal magazine:
There's nothing quite as bad as a bad haircut. And perhaps the worst of all is the cut we call the Mullet.

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