The Bowl Cut

The bowl cut is older than barbers. For centuries it was the haircut you got at home with a pot on your head and everything below the rim trimmed off, and it was fashionable enough in the first half of the 15th century that Joan of Arc had her hair cut that way in 1429. In America it never had much dignity. The 1960s moptop of the Beatles and the Monkees briefly made a round, even cut look modern, but by the 1980s the bowl cut was already a joke about kids whose parents would not pay for a haircut.

That is the version every 90s boy remembers: the mushroom cut, straight fringe across the forehead, the sides and back left the same length or buzzed short underneath, done at home or at the cheapest barbershop in town and immortalized in a school portrait against a laser background. The early 90s was its peak, when it was simply the default haircut for boys who did not yet have an opinion about hair.

The decade's second bowl cut was the one boys actually wanted. Late in the 80s a center-parted style derived from the bowl cut came back, and by the mid-90s it was the teen-idol haircut: Jonathan Taylor Thomas on Home Improvement, Devon Sawa in Casper in 1995, Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys, Rider Strong on Boy Meets World, and Joey on the first season of Friends. Depending on where you lived it was the mushroom cut, curtains, or the less flattering nickname for the two flaps it made when parted down the middle. It took real work: hairspray to hold the front, and the popular kids buzzed the sides so the top hung in two wings. By the late 90s it was on its way out, chased off by spiked hair, frosted tips and, after 2000, the short bleached crops that Eminem and Gladiator made the new default. The bowl cut went back to being an embarrassing haircut, which is what it had always been, and what makes the photos worth keeping.