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.
“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.
The look has gone Hollywood, too. With an upcoming four-part Beatles biopic on the horizon, Harris Dickinson, Barry Keoghan, Joseph Quinn, and Paul Mescal have all trimmed their tendrils to mirror the iconic fringes of the Liverpool quartet. Even this generation’s Clark Kent freed his follicles from the bookish, hairsprayed side-part the character’s donned through its many interpretations, emerging with a curly mop befitting a mild-mannered journalist in 2025. Some netizens referred to Superman’s new look as “alpaca teen gym bro hair.” The style is also known as the “broccoli perm.” In your day-to-day life, you may have noticed it in your little brother’s hair—though his version may take on a fluffier, bushier shape. Or your coworkers dropping the hair routine in favor of a grainier, low-maintenance edge.
“Flow is the word I hear most,” Esparza says of the requests he gets in his chair. “Something looser, easygoing, lived-in.” The goal is a style that feels grown-out, like you’re not trying too hard. The antithesis of Justin Bieber’s gelled-back swoop circa 2016—or Ryan Gosling’s clean-cut pompadour from the same era—today’s popular cuts are designed to go months without maintenance.
Esparza’s clientele—largely high-fashion models and Dimes Square indie sleazers—often arrive with photo references of Australian A-lister Jacob Elordi. For much of 2025, Elordi rocked a choppy cropped mullet, its Frankenstein-ish bangs softening his 6'5" frame with a styled-by-mom, boy-next-door charm. “Fringe is something that comes with that mini-mullet territory,” he says. Seven years ago, Esparza had a single client committed to maintaining a fringe. Now, nearly every cut comes topped with a snippy forehead kiss.
The rise of the boy bang may signal a broader desire to strip ourselves of preciousness, let our hair get salty, oily, and overgrown, even if it obscures our faces. “That super-manicured, coiffed hairstyle was the masculine thing to do then, but it was actually pretty feminine,” Esparza notes of the production it took to maintain hair in the twenty-teens. “Even though hair today is longer and softer—embracing natural curls and waves—it shows an ease in personal style. Like you didn’t do that much to it. Even if, maybe, you did.”