Cool Guys Have Boy Bangs Now
For the past decade, men’s hair was the domain of skin fades, hard parts, and gravity-defying coifs. Call it the millennial boy-band ‘do, or the retired soccer player’s day-old fade—you know the look. Respectable. Kempt. Slightly high-maintenance. (Perhaps with subtle lowlights.) “For so many of those years, everyone wanted to look like David Beckham,” says Mark Alan Esparza, a New York–based hairstylist. “Shaved on the sides, long on top.”
But men aren’t looking so manicured these days. They’re working out in jeans, protein-maxxing by way of all-meat diets, and overall leaning into a more unvarnished kind of guyishness. Alongside the resurgence of homegrown ’90s aesthetics—dirtbag caps, crispy selvedge denim, busted unbranded kicks—hair has followed suit. Today’s styles run the gamut, from snippy bowl cuts to manosphere shags, but they share one inescapable detail: boyish, face-framing bangs
New York musician The Dare has rocked a bed-headed, baby mop top for years. Now the wave of indie rockers rising around him (Jackson Walker Lewis of Fcukers and the grungy duo, The Hellp) has adopted the look, albeit in looser, wetter iterations. Geese’s frontman Cameron Winter and drummer Max Bassin sport a damp, grease-slicked shaggy bob—a description that fits Heated Rivalry star Connor Storrie’s new locks, too.
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“It almost looks like he got out of the shower and put a beanie on to stretch out his hair,” Esparza says of Storrie’s Kurt Cobain-inspired mullet. “It looks very easy, even though I know it probably took a lot of time for his groomer to do that.” Conversely, rocker MJ Lenderman’s hair appears as though it hasn’t been cut in a year. His fringe creeps around his face, buttressing his brooding, disheveled genius-in-a-basement vibe. Even manosphere podcaster Theo Von’s mullet comes with a thick Von Erich–esque curtain, while his streaming foil Hasan Piker has recently begun combing his hair straight down, slight ringlets crowding his perpetually stressed forehead.
