The Mop Top: Why It Defined More Than the 90s
In today's Charlemagne Premium blog we are heading back to the 90s and the mop top haircut that was everywhere in that decade. These days most people write the cut off as a fashion misstep best left in the past. Even so, you almost certainly know a handful of men who wore it. Where did that mass outbreak come from, what other style crimes did the nineties give us, and why did they all end so abruptly?
We will answer those questions, and a few more, in the sections below.
Where it started: the Beatles
The mop top first surfaced in the early 60s, shaped by the members of the rock band The Beatles.
The photographer Jürgen Vollmer, well known at the time, cut Paul McCartney's and John Lennon's hair to match his own. As luck would have it, this happened in a Paris hotel room. The two rock idols had hitchhiked to Paris to visit the photographer. McCartney later described the mop top like this:
"We saw a guy in Hamburg whose hair we liked. John and I hitchhiked to Paris. We asked him to cut our hair the way he had cut his own. He was living in Paris at the time. He was an artist type, a photographer friend of everyone. His name was Jürgen."
Because of the way they looked, which was unusual for the period, and the shape of the hair above all, German audiences started calling the Beatles the "Pilzköpfe", the mushroom heads, purely on the strength of that haircut.
The cut was not always well received, particularly by anyone in an official position. It stood for the rebellious streak that was starting to run through the early sixties.
The nineties, the age of the boy band
After a long quiet spell, the mop top made its comeback in the 90s.
The Backstreet Boys, Take That, Caught in the Act. The music these all-male line-ups put out, the boy bands, defined an entire decade. Even now no nineties party is complete without one of their songs. That decade shaped a lot of people, not only through the music but through everything they lived through as kids and teenagers.
Members of those boy bands in particular wore the mop top, and they turned it back into a trend for the decade. Everyone can picture the classmate who copied Aaron Carter's look. Judged as a misstep today, this extinct trend never regained a foothold in menswear. And we are not even going to start on the bold move of pairing it with a thick full beard. Just do not.
The mop top today
While the mop top left its mark on the nineties in men's fashion, the picture today looks rather different. Women are wearing short hair more and more, and the mop top is part of that. All kinds of styling variations paired with every shade going are shaping the current women's hair scene.
As you have read through our points, the mop top is still very much a talking point. Women in particular have developed a real soft spot for the short cut we are discussing here.
As things stand right now, though, we can only advise against wearing the mop top. Around 80 years after the trend first appeared, it no longer looks current. But as the nineties showed, trends do come back around and become fashion again. So keep an eye on what time brings.
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