For the love of the mullet

So wrong is always right in the end

Back in August British Vogue posted a piece online about the new hairstyle being sported by a lot of cool men, which they called the ‘mini mullet’.

The writer hated it so much the words ‘it must die’ even featured in the headline.

I thought she must be out of her mind.

Austin Butler, also mini-mulleting pleasingly.

Harry Styles looks absolutely amazing with this mullet-ette. Of course, he would look hot as a dog in a Ronald McDonald wig, but I think his mulletini marks a new stage for him.

He looks like a proper man now.

The adorable boy with the floppy fringe and the boufheaded young pop star are left behind. The jaw is firmer, the stubble is properly stubbly – he’s a man and the hair is saying he’s a little bit dangerous.

Like the guy you shouldn’t make eye contact with at the gas station in Alabama, but you can’t help yourself.

If you’ve ever watched that terrible show set down there, which makes Bridgerton look like Ingmar Bergman and was for a while my guilty pleasure – Hart of Dixie – he’s Wade Kinsella.

Mr Wade Kinsella. Hot dggity.

Now Mr Wade didn’t actually have a mullet, but he sort of was a mullet. With his lazy smile and his plaid shirt, it’s like his barber’s shears slipped and just nicked off that longer bit at the back.

While we’re on Wade, it’s worth saying that – like a certain TV duke – he had his own spoon-licking gif. And a shirt event... if you recall another great TV man moment.

Those producers knew what they were doing.

Anyway, back to the modern mullet. My daughter’s boy pals started working the style ironically a couple of years ago and I instantly adored it. The whole reason it works is because people are horrified.

Mr Cyrus.

We are all still carrying the trauma of looks like these… but the new mullet is just different enough to be fabulous and the same enough to be wrongly right.

Which has for so long been my style everything.

It’s why I was entranced by a chunky sock with a Birkenstock clog when I first saw it on my acupuncturist back in the 1980s.

I loved it at first sight for its wrongrightness, although I didn’t have the courage to actually go and buy the Birkos for a few years. I looked at them a lot, but it was a while before I dared.

I have to say I was the first person I knew to wear them for evening. I sourced a black patent pair in the early 2000s and wore them out to dinner that night with black linen drawstring ankle pants and a Helmut Lang sleeveless T.

I felt great and I’ve been wearing them for everything ever since. And with socks when I feel like it. Lurex socks sometimes. Which I’ve worn with high-heeled sandals for years too. Double denim.

Paul Mescal is another dear mulleteer.

I think I love wrongrightness for several reasons.

In the case of double denim it’s because I hate fashion ‘rules’. Why is it wrong? Who says so? It draws the eye down a line of the same fabric, which is great for a short arse like me. I love denim, I love Western style, I love blue. What’s not to love?

The other appeal of wrongyright is the way it makes you look and look again. Your eye goes ‘duh?’ and you have to consider it for a moment. What am I looking at here? Do I hate it?

Quite often, you might at first – and then you get your eye in and realise you love it. Which is what happened with that Vogue writer. She posted a follow up piece a few weeks later saying having seen Mr Styles at London Fashion Week, she now ‘gets’ the mini mullet.

Harry’s London Fashion Week mullet.

Well, it’s good she got her eye in, because I’m telling you now, we have a tsunami of getting used to coming our way. Because I think the mini mullet is the first tentacle of the 80s revival.

It’s taken a good long time, because that decade’s style was shockingly hard to justify once we got into the breathlessly tasteful 90s, but I think it’s finally coming. In fashion and interiors.

The mullet is the first incursion, but once we’ve all ingested the forthcoming TV version of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, which from the trailer appears to be magnificent in its unapologetic 1980s revivalism, I think all that wrongness is going to slip into outrageous rightness again.

Watch the trailer below - and bring on the shoulder pads.

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