Let me start by saying that my hair as a youth was a tragedy. Use whatever comparison you want–the Hindenburg of Hair, the Pompeii of Pompadours*–my hair was a long and limp mess that was only modestly tamed by firm application of brush and blow dryer.
The best thing to happen to my hair when I was a teen was having it all lopped off at age 18 in order to more accurately portray a WWI soldier in a college play.
I spent a few years after that going through a Robert Plant phase before finally coming to my senses and realizing that my thin hair was best-suited to being short or (as it is now) completely absent.
All of this is to preface how kids tend to clump together on the latest fashions (long and limp hair was the defining style of my youth) and just as my classmates once proudly wore acid wash jeans, today’s kids and more specifically, young men, have glommed onto a hairstyle that is pretty much everywhere now: the undercut.
It’s basically shaving the sides and back of the head while leaving the top fuller, allowing it to be styled any ol’ way. The most dubious (though not the most ridiculous–there is a distinction) variant might be one that Men’s Hairstyle Trends calls Short Sides + Long Hair Combover, or as I call it, The Hitler. To be fair, it doesn’t look exactly like Hitler’s hair because this is the 21st century and hair tends to be more fabulously styled now than it was in the early 1940s, at least when it came to fascist dictators. But the general sweep and lines immediately bring to mind Hitler. While some may deliberately choose to emulate this style for obvious if odious reasons, most guys don’t really want to look like Hitler.
And yet here we are.
In truth, the actual hairstyle–the undercut–doesn’t bother me. I find it both comforting and disturbing how each generation of kids slavishly follows whatever happens to be the hot thing and somehow it almost always turns out to be something that looks a little bit ridiculous in hindsight.
At least it’s not the man bun.
(You can see more undercut variants than is probably healthy here: 100+ Best Men’s Hairstyles + New Haircut Ideas)
* a small mercy for those who had to look at me when I was younger: I never actually had a pompadour
