Lose the Peter Pan Haircut
If you're old enough to drive, you shouldn't be asking your stylist for bangs.
-By Katherine Wheelock
Take a cut at the boyish hairdo below.
Image credit: Photofest
Taking the occasional style cue from guys a decade younger than you isn't the worst idea. It keeps you a safe distance from the threshold of grandpa-dom. Laceless All Stars. Denim jackets. Rugby shirts. A man over 30 can get away with these youthful accents from time to time. What a man over 30—a man over 20—cannot get away with is the most recent trend to emerge from the hallways of American adolescence: side-swept bangs. Zac Efron, 20, the pearly-toothed, sapphire-eyed star of the Disney Channel's High School Musical, is the poster child for the cut. But men like 28-year-old Fall Out Boy Pete Wentz are propagating it too.
"A lot of guys are coming in saying they want bangs," says New York hairstylist Takamichi Saeki, who has a salon in the city's East Village. Thirtysomethings who are in the market for a slightly cool-kid aesthetic are walking into Saeki's place clutching photographs of the Peter Pan cut.
"It's usually banker guys who want to be a little more fashionable," Saeki says. "A lot of them are coming in with pictures of Tom Cruise."
The news that men are visiting their hairstylists armed with pages torn from Us Weekly is disturbing enough. The fact that they're bringing in recent snapshots of Tom Cruise is chilling. Cruise's hairstyle has always been reminiscent of a Lego guy's, but the brow-skimming bangs he's had for the last few months have been for a movie—one set in WWII-era Germany, in which he plays a mutinous Nazi.
This highlights another of the associations pin-straight boy bangs have (besides Jonny Quest, the sixties cartoon hero, the von Trapp boys, and Dorothy Hamill): Hitler. They were as essential to his look as his moustache.
Chances are, the fashion-forward preadolescents who are spurring grown men to ask their barbers for long bangs that sweep across their foreheads and curl out whimsically at the ends haven't connected those dots.
Sally Hershberger, the celebrity coiffeuse who gave Meg Ryan a shag in the nineties—and, much more recently, John Mayer his anti-folksy crop—says she gets requests for the Peter Pan cut all the time. From teenagers.
"All the surfer kids in California started wearing their hair like that about a year ago, with the bangs swept across the forehead," Hershberger says. "It's got a mod, Beatles-esque thing about it."
But just because the cut has a history doesn't mean an adult male can co-opt it with stylish irony, like Prefontaine-style Nikes. Boy bangs aren't a classic. They're the male equivalent of pigtails.
"We picked up my friend's daughter at school the other day. She and her friends wanted me to give her little brother the Zac Efron cut," Hershberger says. "He's 8. He wasn't into it."
Smart man.
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I may be in Love with Katherine Wheelock
Mateo
Oct 1, 2007 7:07:28 PM
I love this article, and I know it was more convenient in this context to have Tom Cruise's haircut linked to his role as a 'mutinous Nazi', but I'd just like to point out that that's an extremely reductive way of describing the character he's playing - Graf von Stauffenberg tried to ASSASSINATE Hitler and was executed. The emphasis in your phrasing was on the fact that he was in the German military in WWII, not what he is known for. In fact, there was much controversy in Germany over the choice of Cruise to play Stauffenberg, as Stauffenberg is really revered as a historical figure, and Tom Cruise is seen as being something of a sinister figure in terms of his affiliation with Scientology.
germangirl18
Oct 12, 2007 11:55:14 PM
Your article is the worst thing ever. First you have the lamest guys who sport the fringe. Second, in the same issue, I counted about 20 models all over 18 who have that cut. Also if you look at the 2008 spring runway shows, you will see the cut everywhere. What's the deal. Do you have any business writting for Details? How did they let you get away with that article. Oh and, how about ALl the cool British rockers who sport that cut. Let's see, Klaxons, Franz, Justice, etc. etc. ect. Not to mention last months cover of GQ with ROBERT REDFORD. He has had that cut his whole life, and you say it isn't classic. At first I thought you were some jocko guy who had it in for cool guys, but when I read that you're a woman......wow. You must have no fashion sense.
justjoiningforthis
Oct 26, 2007 4:13:44 PM
spelling mistakes are because I was mad dash typing.
justjoiningforthis
Oct 26, 2007 4:14:38 PM
oh, and what's wrong with guys bringing a pic to the stylest. Oh I guess because we are men we should jsut say "give me a crewcut".
justjoiningforthis
Oct 26, 2007 4:17:21 PM
dude, you should justcutyourbangs. mateo- I think you're on to something- this Wheelock chick is "for real".
andy_mac
Nov 26, 2007 6:26:37 PM