He doesn’t care about the looks of others. Royally. Luca fully embraces his mullet cut. And he loves her. “It’s a stylish cut. If you have the style, you have this cut. And I have the style,” he says, confident. At the age of 13, he reached the third step of the podium in the Swiss Mullet Cup.
The first edition of the Swiss championship was held at the beginning of October, as part of the Foire du Valais, in Martigny: 156 participants, coming from the four corners of the country, but also from France, Belgium and Ireland.
Mules not only on stage
But mullets aren’t just on stage. In the public too, there are many fans of the long neck. The number of mules per square meter is certainly higher than normal. But it is proof that the cut, long considered out of date, has become fashionable again.
Let’s lay the foundations first. A mullet can be summed up in one phrase, which has become almost mythical over the decades: “short in front, short on the sides, long in the back.” Simple. Effective. Yet nothing is less like a mule than another mule.
“The basis is identical, but there are multitudes,” smiles Aurélie Pontoise, hairdresser from Lyon present in Martigny and who officiated last year during the Euro Mulet, the continental championship which was held in the Creuse. And the Frenchwoman details: more or less discreet, more or less long, more or less degraded, more or less stylized.
Not all the same
Mullets do not always look like the image we might have of this cut which became popular in the 1970s and 1980s, notably thanks to singer Rod Stewart, who was the first personality to wear one in 1971.
Other artists followed suit: Bono, Keith Richards, Paul McCartney and even David Bowie, who, in 1972, made this cut the trademark of his character Ziggy Stardust. Speaker at the London College of Fashion and author of the book A Century of Hairstyles (2014, Bloomsbury Publishing), Pamela Church Gibson explained to Le Monde in 2018 that “the fact that musicians adopted the mullet cut gave it a little taste of a very cutting-edge subculture. Then the cut began to be adopted by footballers in the mid-1970s, eventually becoming their trademark in the 1980s.”
The Germans Franz Beckenbauer and Rudi Völler, the Englishman Chris Waddle and the Italian Roberto Baggio are all football stars who have worn the mullet.
A name taken from the Beastie Boys
On TV, the iconic MacGyver, played by Richard Dean Anderson, but also Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme will also shine the spotlight on this cut, before his notoriety declined during the 1990s.
Associated with certain male heroes often considered macho and caricatures, the cut loses its splendor at the very moment when it takes its name mullet. A name taken from the song Mullet Head by the American rap group Beastie Boys, released in 1994 – until then the expression “mule head” designated a somewhat stupid person and the cut had no name.
