"A Haircut Returns, From The 1930s" reads like such a typical New York Times trend piece headline. Oh, whatever could it be? Are finger-curls coming back? Shall we witness the return of bobs? Oh. No such luck. The Times alleges that people are walking into barber shops and asking for Hitler hairdos.
The exact style that the Times reports young men are calling "the Hitler Youth," at least according to one barber, is a variation on the short back 'n' sides, with the hair around the nape practically shorn, but the crown left long. Picture the '90s undercut, only more aggressive, and with longer tendrils on top.
[A] lot of them just ask for a Hitler Youth, said Sam Buffa, a founding partner of the barbershop. "I was trying to not use that" term, he added.
The old-school coif has become a go-to haircut not just for Web designers in heritage-brand clothing, but for fashion designers and D.J.'s in the style capitals of Europe.
"I think it goes along with a newly restored romance for tailoring, the cut and craftsmanship you see with this current heritage trend," said Scott Schuman, a photographer who has captured men with the hairstyle in London, Paris and New York for his blog, the Sartorialist.
Now, you may think this is actually not a Nazi-identified haircut at all, that it is too generic to be really Reich-y. Although the haircut was certainly popular with men in the 1930s, it was hardly exclusively worn by the Nazi military, as contemporary photographs of Resistance fighters and laborers who also sport it show. There are in fact many possible, significantly less-offensive, alternative names for this style: The David Lynch. The George Orwell. The Bernard Sumner. The Tilda. The, er, Sir Edmund Hillary. Hell, if we absolutely had to, we could call it the Teenaged Ratzinger. J/k, Catholics.
But the Hitler Youth? Even if only one single barber in the West Village of New York has ever heard a customer use the term, that is still just not an acceptable thing to call a haircut. Nazi is not a trend! Not for fall or for anytime! How does that even work? How does any self-respecting man who's read The Diary of Anne Frank, who's ever gone on a school field-trip to a World War II memorial, find himself settling into a barber chair and saying the words, "Gimme the Hitler Youth, Sam." NO SERIOUSLY. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN. Are these men all ironic Facebook friends with David Irving, too? And what does Sam say in response? Does he ever just start humming "Karma Police"? I need someone to re-enact the whole exchange for me because I do not understand how this actually takes place. In the 21st Century. Outside of some fringe David Duke survivalist commune in Montana. This is not okay. Please, men. Can't we stop the madness?
A Haircut Returns From The 1930s [NYTimes]