Ducktail
hairstyle
The ducktail is a men's haircut style popular during the 1950s. It is also called the duck's tail, duck's ass, duck's arse, or simply D.A. and is also described as slicked back hair. The hair is pomaded (greased), combed back around the sides, and parted centrally down the back of the head.
History
Joe Cirello, a barber from Philadelphia, said he had invented the duck's ass in 1940, and he called the swung hair sides and their termination 'The Swing', after the musical style of the day. He'd practiced on a lonely blind boy for about eighteen months. The duck's tail became an emblematic coiffure of disaffected young males across the English-speaking world during the 1950s. In Britain, it formed part of the visual identity of teddy boys and rockers, along with the quiff and the elephant's trunk.
Combing technique
The style required that the hair be combed back around the sides of the head. The teeth edge of a comb was then used to define a central parting running from the crown to the nape at the back of the head, resembling, to many, the rear end of a duck. The hair on the top front of the head was either deliberately disarrayed so that untidy strands hung down over the forehead, or combed up and then curled down into an 'elephant's trunk' which would hang down as far as the top of the nose.
“Ducktail” enters the record as hairstyle. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ducktail and hairstyle can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2092988. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1940.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ducktail” 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.