The house boy haircut is an abomination and it must be stopped

You’ve seen it, haven’t you? For the last few years it’s slithered around warehouse dancefloors on top of men with six-pack abs and maniacal gurns. You’ve probably come to accept it as normal. Maybe, God forbid, you’ve considered doing it to yourself. But I am here to say once and for at all: it’s time for the house boy haircut to be laid to rest.

Sitting like a flag atop a mountain hewn from lean muscle and powdered with Tom Ford Noir, the house boy haircut is reserved for blokes who go out for two reasons: popping pills and pulling girls. You know, blokes who take club photos where they hold a bottle of Goose in one hand and point ironically at their mate with the other. Blokes who just fucking love listening to Gorgon City, or even Hot Since 82 if they’re feeling extra norty.

This guy has it

It’s hard to tell where it originated. Some say it came about as a perversion of David Beckham’s H&M era haircut; others say the Peaky Blinders were responsible for bringing the curtain cut to the masses. This marvellous sweep, this limp Nike swoosh of hairstyles has spread through the music-loving male coterie like a virus – but it wasn’t until 2016 that the trend went full epidemic.

Now it’s everywhere, as if a cabal of young men’s heads decided this was the year to stand proudly apart. “WE ARE DESPERATE TO BE UNIQUE,” their lids yelled, looking like they were trying to escape off the back of their heads like a badly-fitted toupee in a wind tunnel.

So does this guy

It doesn’t seem that long ago that we banished the topknot, yet this is just the latest iteration of that tightly-bunned shitshow. Like its predecessor, it’s a haircut for show-offs; it’s an evolution, a step up from the world of laddiness into that of being an uber-lad. The sort of lad who wears a military green bomber jacket and spray-on acid-wash jeans, who spends his money on Croatian festivals and a gold alloy signet ring he got down the market for 40 quid.

They’re not bad guys – they’re probably the most fun people you know. That’s what it’s all about; the bravado, the mischief, the ability to compress their entire personality into a haircut which is just out-there enough to let the world know how cheeky they really are.

Tell me you don’t want to go on a night out with this guy

These brave men have literally sat in a barber’s chair and said “cut off my hair, yeah, but only up to this exact point, then leave the rest.” Do they take a photo to the hairdressers with them? Or is it of Dash from The Incredibles?

The house boy haircut isn’t about being different – it’s about not being too different. Men with it don’t want to write a bestseller or colonise Mars or become the leader of the free world; they dream about being given a booth with a free bottle of their choosing at Cafe Del Mar in Ibiza every summer, or smugly discovering a DJ who their mates start Shazaming a good six months later.

They’re fine with that, and I guess I’m fine with it too. Just do it with a short back and sides, like the rest of us.