The Metaphysics of Mullets

What were we thinking. I don’t recall ever sporting a Mullet. Perhaps I’ve just repressed the memory. Fashion, whether it be for clothes, hairstyles, colours, whatever, is cyclical. Hemlines go up and down with the tide of time, turn-ups turn up and turn down, and floral wallpaper comes back as retro. Thus far, history has resisted a second coming of the Mullet. Perhaps civilisation was so badly scarred by this aberration that resistance to the Mullet was appended to the collective unconscious. Fear of the mullet is now innate, sitting somewhere between fear of spiders and a natural and healthy repulsion towards eating one’s own (or for that matter, anyone else’s) excrement.

If you’re too young to remember the Mullet, then here is, in my opinion, one of the very finest (worst?) examples:

Purists might argue that the above is not a bona fide Mullet. Though I have no formal training in this field, I believe that the fringeless variation (I propose Mullet Sans) is in fact the archetypal Mullet, and that the with-fringe variations are a later, apocryphal addition.

Imagine the look on Howard Carter’s face when he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb and glorious death mask. What will anthropologists and archaeologists make of the Mullet 1000 years hence? I’m sure they’ll be awe struck. They’ll probably bury all evidence in some underground vault, and label it simply ‘WTF’.

For those interested in further research, I suggest the wonderful Sexy People. Even if you have no interest in the Mullet, several minutes browsing that site will lift your spirits. It’s about perspective, and the calming reassurance that comes with thinking, thank god I don’t look like that guy.

A mullet is a unisex hair style that is short in the front and long in the back. — source: some idiot on Wikipedia.

Mullet: from the Latin verb mulletum, meaning to look silly. — source: Me.

Reference and further reading:
The Mullet: Hairstyle of the Gods — Barney Hoskyns, et al.