Mullet (haircut)
hairstyle characterized by short hair at the front and sides and long hair at the back of the head
The mullet is a hairstyle in which the hair is cut shorter at the front, top and sides, but is longer at the back.
Etymology
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, use of the term mullet to describe this hairstyle was "apparently coined, and certainly popularized, by American hip-hop group the Beastie Boys", who used "mullet" and "mullet head" as epithets in their 1994 song "Mullet Head", combining it with a description of the haircut: "number one on the side and don't touch the back, number six on the top and don't cut it wack, Jack." They expounded on the subject at length in a six-page article entitled "Mulling Over The Mullet" in Issue 2 (1995) of their magazine Grand Royal, offering a selection of alternative names for the cut, including "Hockey Player Haircut" and "Soccer Rocker".
False etymology
Although a widely circulated image from the Australian automotive magazine Street Machine appeared to show the term in use as early as January 1992, the Oxford English Dictionary was unable to verify the authenticity of this citation. On an episode of Slate's Decoder Ring podcast, Willa Paskin discussed the etymology of the term and discovered that the magazine image had been faked. In a 2018 apology posted to imgur, the creator had admitted to faking the text and adjusting the magazine dates.
Fashion history
In antiquity
Historian Suetonius writes that the Roman emperor Tiberius "wore his hair rather long at the back, so much so as even to cover the nape of his neck", and that this was a tradition of his family, the Claudians. One bust of Tiberius's great-nephew Caligula has short locks across the forehead and longer hair behind.
A metal figurine, dated back to the 1st-century CE and found during 2018 preparations for a new car park at the Wimpole Estate, England, was hypothesised by archaeologists to indicate that natives in ancient Britain during the Roman occupation could have worn their hair similarly to mullets.
In the sixth century, Byzantine scholar Procopius wrote that men from the Blue faction wore their hair long at the back and cut it short over the forehead. This non-Roman style was termed the "Hunnic" look.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Mullet (haircut)” is hairstyle characterized by short hair at the front and sides and long hair at the back of the head. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mullet, haircut and hairstyle, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1410374. The Library of Congress control number is sh00005888. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1995, 1992 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mullet (haircut)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.