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  Free Mohawks







  A selection of annotated mohawks.
   buckwheaton

Free mohawks, ladies and gentlemen. Free mohawks. A haircare experiment conducted at the Sunset Junction street fair in the Los Feliz/Silverlake area of Los Angeles.
MOHAWK STYLE GUIDE :
^ This guy got the first mohawk of the weekend. He was really quiet, barely saying anything. He just nodded, sat down, got his haircut, then left.
^ This guy said he was "OP" -- original punk -- from back in '76-'77, and he just wanted a buzz. It would have been tough to give him a good mohawk, anyway.
^ This girl was great. She just wanted a touch-up. The guy in the picture was hanging out all day and helping us heckle people into getting mohawks. Here's how she turned out.
^ The guy with the clippers in this picture was also there all day. He was pretty drunk by the time he started cutting peoples hair, and he was just taking wild swipes at people's heads. I was getting nervous, and you can see the worried looks on the faces of people in the background. He puked later.
^ This girl was sure her parents were going to kill her. She had a court date coming up sometime this week for a curfew violation. She wanted a checkerboard pattern on her head.
^ This guy was really serious about being punk rock and once he got his mohawk he ran around screaming shit in a british accent like "you're all blokes".
^ He came back on Sunday with a riding crop trying to spank people.


^ This guy was my crowning achievement of the weekend: a "Mr. T" style mohawk, on a white guy no less. Check out the results here and here. I was so fucking proud. His girlfriend was crying, though, and not because she was happy.
^ This girl was a real sweetheart. Her hair was clean and it smelled really good. We chopped about a third of if off, just on one side, because that's what she wanted. Look at her eyes in this picture. I want to marry her.


^ This kid's mom came with him and convinced him to get a mohawk. She made him get it, and he didn't really want one. Which is weird because his two brothers were with him, and she asked if they wanted to get them, and they said no, and she left it at that, but she harrassed this one till he did it.
^ Tri-hawk. Word.
^ She wanted a Chelsea, that sexy skinhead girl haircut. You know a girl with a Chelsea is going to be screaming dirty shit in bed. It's not a mohawk, but the spirit was there, and you could do it with clippers. She got hers in the end, although you can't really tell from this picture. Sorry.
There was actually a point when there were like 10-15 cops standing around watching me cut hair and trying to convince each other to get mohawks. None of them did. That sucks.


^ Cute girl. With mohawk.
^ I cut this guy's dreads off. So he went from being a hippie to one of those incubus-type guys. He still smokes pot though.
HISTORY OF THE MOHAWK :
^ This guy almost got a "Mr. T" but chickened out and had us keep cutting until he had nothing left on the side. Bad move in my book, brah.
^ This girl got talked into her mohawk by her friend and basically deciided it was a bad idea the moment after i had started chppoing her hair off. Which was bad because that meant she was fighting it the whole time in a passive-agressive way. And her hair was the dirtiest and clumpiest of anyone out there except, of course, the guy with the dreads.
^ So it didn't turn out so great. It was her own damn fault. Wash your hair.


^ Ladies love mohawks.
^ Last to be annotated is this new-wave fellow, who had great 'hawk hair. Perfect to spike up. He took off his shirt, wrote on himself, and then stood in front of a store, quite proud of himself.
a-diction.com 
The Classic

The Hawk-Mo ("No-Hawk")

The Mr. T

Illustrations by Matt Rebholz


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The Hairstyle That Wouldn't Die

 The mohawk hairstyle was first documented in the 1600s by white invaders in present day eastern US and Canadian territories who observed the distinctive cut on young men of the Iroquois Nation. Though associated by name with the Mohawks, the style was worn by several eastern Native American tribes. There is evidence that this raised strip of hair down the center of their heads was often a deer hair Mohawk-toupee; not the man's actual hair.

The style was adopted for the first time by whites in World War II when US paratroopers in Europe shaved the sides of their heads. They left a stripe down the middle in imitation of an airstrip, perhaps in hopes of a sympathetic magic.

In the 70s, the 'hawk became associated with rebellion and alienation. The mohawk ascended to the ultimate sign of the outsider in Scorcese's 1976 film Taxi Driver. Robert De Niro (as cabbie Travis Bickle) gets a gun, shaves himself a mohawk and avenges himself on society. The relevance of this act was recognized by disaffected kids in the burgeoning first wave punk scene who adopted the look as an emblem of the punk attitude. Bold, aggressive, and easy to appropriate, the image proved popular with the media as well: one may nostalgically recall quaint, cartoonish images of 80s punkers -- sporting mohawks -- supposedly representing the epitome of nihilistic urban gangtuffs in film and comics.
Storm from the X-Men
Now generalized as a symbol of estrangement, the mohawk has been used to emphasize an individual's break with society. Storm from the X-Men, a character who, as a woman, a black, and a mutant, was triply outcast, embraced her outsider status by shaving her hair into a mohawk.

Nowadays -- even though FauxHo celebrities and soccer players sport well-groomed 'hawks as badges of their well-groomed "transgressive" spirits -- the playful exuberance and the "fuck you"-to-the-squares lives on in tall and proud mohawks. They continue to hold the self-selected dispossessed of our times in their undeniable allure.

 butchersam
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