A couple of hours ago I was sitting at one of the picnic tables outside of the Whole Foods market at Fairfax and Santa Monica, and all of a sudden I noticed that every guy sitting at every table nearby was wearing a Hitler Youth cut (i.e., Brad Pitt whitewalls with short sprigs on top). The crowd doesn’t get much hipper than at Whole Foods, so this means pretty much every guy in West Hollywood, gay or straight, is wearing one. Except for guys like me, of course.
A year ago Jezebel‘s Kate Spries posted a piece called “Every Dude You Know Is Getting This Haircut,” but these trends take time. Now even the laggers have caught on. My son Jett has been wearing a slightly longer variation. Even David Poland (whom I saw last night at a Far From The Madding Crowd screening on the Fox lot) is sporting what you could call an Almost Hitler Youth cut, or at least a quite short one.
So I’m sitting there, totally surrounded by these dedicated followers of fashion, and going “Wow, I’m the only guy with somewhat lengthy hair here.” I got out the iPhone and did a search on “Hitler Youth” and found a few references, and so I went up to this one guy who was sitting with his girlfriend (who was definitely prettier than Eva Braun) and clicked my heels and raised my right arm and shouted “Seig Heil!” Okay, I didn’t do that but I wanted to in a way.
The interesting thing is that today’s Hitler Youth cuts are not modifications — the whitewalls are in no way grown out or just a teeny bit longer than the whitewalls that, say, Heinrich Himmler wore in 1936. I want desperately to get a Hitler Youth cut but I can’t. They look so fucking ugly and I just can’t. But I feel so left out, so alone. I so want to be belong.