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Chuckled - Blog Posts
Ay woah don’t discredit urself ,
This is fucking hilarious
*Married life playing in the background
This idea was probably funnier in my head
The complicated historical context of Stan's mullet
I never did fully save/combine the collective 4 minutes on the history of mullets in my video, so let me tell you more here on tumblr.
Something interesting about mullets is that for the better part of the 80s, we didn't actually call them mullets in the United States. They were just A Hairstyle Men Had. I don't know how to express that mullets were so ubiquitous as a men's hairstyle that the term was largely unnecessary - it was The Look.
So where did "mullet" as a term come from?
Though the hairstyle itself dates back to ancient times, with the Iliad — written around 750-700 BC — including descriptions of warriors with “hair long at the back”, many credit the Beastie Boy’s 1994 titular tribute song ‘Mullet Head’ with being the first to actually use the term to refer to men with the hairstyle (complete with a description of the hairstyle: "Number one on the side and don't touch the back, number six on the top and don't cut it wack, Jack") though BEFORE then, the term mullethead was a term dating back to the 1800s that just meant a foolish person.
But some have pointed out an earlier usage, before 1994, which may have predated the Beastie Boys (though the jury is out on whether or not it was part of their songs' inspiration).
French fashion guru Henri Mollet was among the first to notably wear this style in the 20th century, in the 1970s (though David Bowie wore it around the same time, with a bigger societal impact). This led to Mollet's hairstyle being described in France as a "Mollet."
The thing is that, for the most part, while some in France called it a Mollet (pronounced like moe-lay, I believe), the term did not make it to the United States. It barely left France, but the term may have been anglicized to the surrounding areas as "mullet," where it existed in Europe to describe Mollet's signature hairstyle.
So if it was a European term and not even in the US, how would Stan have learned this term?
Well, according to his Stetson Pinesfield ID (the ID from "Not What He Seems" that greatly matches his appearance from his date with Carla McCorkle at the Juke Joint, but there's more on that in the video), he's been to London.
It is of note that there are very limited records of the term Mollet being used, so some historians disagree that this is a true origin of the term outside of a hyperlocal sense surrounding France, but it WOULD would make it within the realm of possibility for Stan to have heard the term before 1994, and use it in 1983 (and yes, it's 83, not 82, more on that in the vid).
