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Quiz: Hitler Youth or Hipster with an Undercut?
Can you tell who’s wearing the Nazi ’do facetiously?
Officially, they call this haircut the “undercut”: shaved tight on the sides, an abrupt transition to long hair on top, easily parted. It’s so popular that it’s become the standard haircut for fashionable male urbanites, and BuzzFeed even dubbed it “the cutting edge of hotness.”
Yet the undercut has a dark history. That’s because it was popularized by the Nazi party in Berlin; indeed, flip through any history book, and you’re apt to see it crop up a lot in images of the Third Reich.
Sure, there’s no inherent reason that the haircut must be equated with fascism; one might compare it to the swastika, an ancient symbol in Hinduism and Buddhism that the Nazis stole. (That’s another thing Nazis and hipsters have in common: both are really into cultural appropriation.) Yet in the Western World, we still associate the swastika with Nazism, and if you go out in public with a swastika on your shirt you’ll deservedly get punched in the face — whereas thousands of well-dressed young men, almost none of whom are fascists, rock the undercut on public transit every day without anyone batting an eyelash. And while I, as a Jew, am alarmed when I see an undercut in the wild, I’m apparently in the minority.
It may not be coincidence that the new faces of the alt-right — which has been gaining political power over the past few years — don the undercut (see: Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos). Curious, no? Which brings up another question: which came first — our nation’s turn towards authoritarian politics, or the resurgence of this fashy (as in fascist) haircut? Is it not a coincidence that the undercut is in vogue at this political moment?
Here, I’ve taken photos of contemporary undercut-donning youth, made them look weathered, then placed them side by side with photos of Nazi youth. See if you can tell the difference. The answers are at the end.
1. Real fascist or “ironic” “fascist”?
