A homage to curtains

The greatest hairstyle white men ever achieved

Aug 18, 2024

From left to right: David Beckham, Leonardo DiCaprio & Nick Carter

The first time I ever cried myself to sleep over a boy was when I was eight years old. After sitting through all 195 minutes of Titanic, when prompted, my mother gently told me that it was unlikely that I would ever know Leonardo DiCaprio because he lived so far away, and was so much older than I was. I was bereft, but I was also confused. Because it wasn’t Leonardo DiCaprio that I wanted, it was Jack Dawson. Very specifically so. I curled up in bed and wept for the boy whose beautiful blonde hair had turned blue as he sank into the deep. We would never know each other.

Only a handful of years later, when I would watch DiCaprio in other films - films like Catch Me If You Can where he’d trimmed back his silky tresses - I noticed he no longer held the same allure. I thought of the sincere way he’d flicked his hair out of his eyes as he sketched Rose’s nude portrait, the way he’d spat into his hands to slick it back under the stolen hat, and something clicked.

The hair made the man. And that hair was curtains.

Curtains: the major players

After that emotional-sexual awakening, I began to see Jack Dawson’s hairstyle everywhere. Born in 1992, I was dithering on the doorstep of puberty as the curtain boomed, full of confused desire for floppy-haired teenagers in pale, salt-stained jeans.

On a global scale, you had Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys, arguably as famous as DiCaprio in the Curtain Hall of Fame. Brad Pitt - perhaps not as well-known for his curtains as some - still wore them beautifully. In the UK, of course, we had David Beckham—one who always scored additional points for adding icy highlights to his already bombshell hair. Across the Irish Sea were Westlife, of which Kian Egan was a particular favourite of mine. Could he sing? Not really. Did he have glossy blonde curtains that fell to his eyebrows? Unsurprisingly, yes.

westlife (debut album) — From left to right: Brian McFadden, Mark Feehily, Nicky Byrne, Shane Filan & Kian Egan.

More than just a hairstyle

So, what was the underlining power of curtains in the nineties? Why did a hairstyle have such a profound and lasting effect on our cultural memory?

To me, curtains were representative of a specific type of man - a fictional man, like Jack Dawson - who stole hearts and ultimately made money. The Curtained Man fell in love quickly, but permanently. For Jack Dawson, it was love at first and last sight. The same for DiCaprio’s Romeo in Baz Luhrmann’s 1997 movie adaption of Romeo and Juliet. Similarly, in the Backstreet Boy’s 1997 hit As Long As You Love Me, Nick Carter, sings “People say I'm crazy and that I am blind, risking it all in a glance.” And I don’t think Westlife released a single song that wasn’t about true and everlasting love. Even David Beckham, whose personal brand elevated him to almost fictional status, managed to stay with the same woman all this time—no mean feat in the world of professional football.

“Non-threatening boys” (a term that first appeared as the title of Lisa Simpson’s favourite magazine) were what girls wanted in the nineties. In the 1999 film, The Talented Mr Ripley, you might say of Tom Ripley - played by a baby-faced Matt Damon - that his greatest method of deception was his honey-blonde curtained hair. A man with curtains a violent murderer? Impossible.

But, like any aesthetic trend, curtains couldn’t last forever. The frosted tip would usurp the hairstyle as the new it-cut. It symbolised a more rebellious persona, aligning with its core audience: the girls of the nineties were turning into the young women of the noughties. Blink 182’s Mark Hoppus, Matt Willis and Charlie Simpson from Busted. They all began gelling their tinted tips into careful disarray—a style which, though still appealing to a pre-teen girl like me, seemed to symbolise the end of the fairytale and the beginning of sticky, box-dyed reality. Men with curtains could be counted upon for their loving permanence. The only thing permanent about the frosted-tip boys were their tattoos.

The Greatest of All Time

All this to say, white men looked fucking great with curtains. If we go ahead and compare the style to others that we’ve had to endure in the years since - the Tommy Shelby undercut that literally only looks good on Cillian Murphy, the Justin Bieber bowl cut, the raggedy man bun - the rest pale in comparison.

I’m not so naive as I was when I cried over Jack Dawson’s watery death as an eight-year-old girl. I know that nothing lasts forever: fictional boyfriends, beautiful hairstyles. At yet, if I were to leave some parting words for the curtain, I would borrow from the aforementioned Westlife:

“I swore to you my love would remain. And I’d swear it all over again.”