Vogue scorned them, Iran banned them, Manchester still loves them

You’re a Hittite warrior from the 16th Century BCE, and you’re getting a haircut. Decked out in your finest bronze-plate armour, not long back from a plunder, the Anatolian sun combined with that little leather helmet you always wear (not to mention the looming threat of the Middle Assyrian Empire closing in) is making your head sweat. Your Hittite barber flips his iron clippers. “Short back and sides?” he asks. But you say no. Short back and sides is so fourteen-hundreds. No, you want a mullet.

Mullets came into fashion in ancient Mesopotamia, and cropped up again shortly afterwards in Syria, Asia Minor and Anatolia. There was another great resurgence when David Bowie got one, and then a few years ago they became quite popular in the Northern Quarter, thanks to a revival that started either in Ireland or Australia, or by a certain well-known charismatic maniac featured in a Netflix documentary, depending on who you ask.

In 2022, the sort of people in Manchester wearing them could be loosely described as ‘alternative’ — the types to put on noise gigs in the venue above the venue above the Peer Hat. By 2024 they were co-opted by the ‘cool’ —  bootcut-jean-wearing, pornstar-moustache-having adverts for why not to use the dating app Hinge, who presumably hang out in Ancoats. By 2025, you could wear a mullet to your job interview and find yourself matching with the panel; the style has well and truly been neutered by the mainstream. And while this comeback was UK-wide, it’s arguable that nowhere in England embraced the mullet more than Manchester — for a time they were synonymous with the city, with nearby Liverpool being evidently far too loyal to the ket wig.

The mullet has been hailed as the latest look for over 30,000 years, and in the meantime has gathered its fair share of enemies: Vogue described them as “history’s most divisive hairstyle”, and Iranian officials designated them a form of “Western cultural invasion”. And while these days the mullet has been embraced as conventional, in a small, disused swimming pool just across from Canal Street, one hairdressing salon is helping to keep a tradition of alternative mullet-dom alive.

“Who decides what’s going out of fashion?” ask Phoebe, the face behind Rude Hair salon, as she swivels in her barber’s chair. While many believe the mullet to be on its last legs, in the last few months The Times, GQ, and interestingly, the Lancashire Evening Post all claimed the mullet to be making a ‘second comeback’ (the latter suggesting this was mostly occurring among trendy eight year olds). Phoebe herself is bleached-blonde and mulleted, though she keeps the longer bits tied up as she works, floating around the empty blue-tiled pool turned makeshift barber shop. As she cuts and styles and sweeps, she chats with her customers in an accent that lands somewhere between her hometown of Leeds, and Manchester: her adopted home since 2018.

Phoebe started Rude Hair two years ago, but has been hairdressing for a fair bit longer than that. Leaving home when she was a teenager and soon after finding herself living with various punks, she would regularly end up cutting friends’ and acquaintances' hair, as well as occasionally her own. In 2023, at the age of 21, she decided it was time to get formally qualified, and shortly afterwards found a space in Shallows Studio — an alternative beauty parlour run from an abandoned hotel pool. Shallows itself opened its doors during the Covid-19 pandemic, and quickly became a thriving collective for experts in all things skin deep: tattoos and piercings, eyebrows and lashes, nails and, naturally, hair.

Phoebe tells me that the mullet, too, found its way back into the western-world-wide spotlight during lockdown. There are many theories as to why, one being the popularity of the absurd true crime documentary Tiger King, featuring the heavily mulleted Joe Exotic, which graced millions of screens on account of us all not being allowed to leave the house the month it was released. But I prefer the thesis Phoebe outlines: that while confined to their homes, more and more people took to cutting their hair themselves — and being not correctly equipped for the task, they couldn’t see the back.

This DIY approach is key to understanding the inner mechanics of the mullet. Phoebe tells me that even those who come to her salon often want to look as though they cut their hair themselves. The scene of mulleteers is intrinsically linked to other DIY scenes in Manchester: musicians and artists putting on their own gigs and exhibitions, and squatters taking over abandoned buildings in the city. 

Alongside its brothers and sisters — the shag, the wolf cut, the skullet (a combination buzz-cut-mullet where you shave the head but leave the back and sometimes the fringe or sideburns) — the mullet remains Phoebe’s most popular cut, even as magazines proclaim its demise. The skullet is gaining traction though, perhaps as an altogether more harrowing alternative to the mullet’s recent return to mainstream approval.

She cuts at least two mullets a day, she tells me, and last week she cut four skullets in a row. Among many Rude Hair customers, these haircuts are used as a social indicator. This is occasionally an indicator of class, namely working-class pride (Phoebe’s haircuts are strictly ‘pay as you feel’ in order to keep them accessible to everyone, although I’m told by numerous Rude Hair clientele that the mullet has now been firmly adopted by the posh), but more frequently, the mullet is an indicator of queerness.

“It’s very intrinsically queer,” says Freya, 22, originally from North Yorkshire, now in Phoebe’s barber’s chair. Shallows’ proximity to Canal Street means that the studio is intent on honouring the surrounding queer community, as they account for a significant portion of their clientele. Freya had a purple mullet for years, but today she’s opting for a shorter look: a cropped mohawk with a gentle fade, and feathery black dye on blonde hair creating what looks like reverse-frosted-tips. For her, a haircut is a way of expressing identity, namely gender identity — some days she might want to present in a more masculine way, other days more feminine, and she needs a haircut that follows suit. However, she’s not interested in making any kind of statement. When I ask how she wants her haircut to make her look – Beautiful? Clever? Professional? Cool? – she answers, “I just want to look like myself.”

But this hasn’t always been simple. Freya moved to Manchester for university in 2022, and prior to that she grew up in a small, conservative town where Rishi Sunak remains the local MP. As a teenager she experimented with outlandish hairstyles — mowhawks, chelsea cuts, buzz cuts with patterns dyed into them — which didn’t always go down great on the streets of the Richmond and Northallerton constituency. Nowadays, living in Manchester, no one really bats an eye, but more interesting is the change that has come across her hometown. She tells me that mullets now run rampant in rural North Yorkshire, and are particularly a hit among the young farmers — there’s only one club in the town which, late on a Saturday, hosts a Young Farmers Night. “You see them all roll up with their mullets and their gilets, with little brown loafers and Levi’s blue jeans,” she says, unimpressed. “It’s not a good look. I mean, each to their own, but I’m always a bit baffled by it.”

Next in the chair, Morgan, 19, agrees that the mullet has been claimed (or rather reclaimed) by the Dreaded Normal Bloke. In 2022, he tells me, he and “every single person he knew” had a mullet. Nowadays, they’re not as popular among the early-adult crowd, but still they persevere. Morgan comes from a similarly northern and small-town background as Freya, growing up in the Lake District town of Whitehaven and afterwards moving to Kendal. What are the countryside hairstyle trends? “I think it’s just short back and sides,” he says. In Kendal it’s bobs, buzzes, and waves for women. In Manchester however, he found self-expression through the medium of hair. “It’s about transforming yourself,” he says. “A haircut can change how you look and feel on a deeper level.”

But the popularity of the mullet has ebbed and flowed throughout all known history, and some, like Morgan, fear it may once again have reached its high water mark, about to recede. Soon, he fears, the mullet may be all but gone from Manchester. “The culture is turning more traditional,” he says. “It’s about being pretty and presentable at work.” And indeed online trends over the last few years, like the return of the Trad Wife, or the ‘Clean Girl’ aesthetic, suggest a possible return of neat fashion and compliant gender norms. When I ask Freya what she thinks the next big thing in Mancunian hair styles will be, she thinks for a while, then answers “short back and sides” — a sad indictment of the times. 

But Phoebe, haircut connoisseur and ultimate mullet authority, says that those two don’t know what they’re talking about. For her at least, there will never come a time when the mullet is no longer on trend. “It’s timeless,” she says.