Sometimes Malcolm Todd looks like just rolled out of bed. He has an affinity for not wearing a shirt—he went topless for for his June performance on The Tonight Show and flaunted his torso throughout his inaugural Gap campaign—and his hair typically looks like it was touching a pillow just moments ago. That’s all on purpose. Having gone through a variety of haircut phases from buzzcut to shag, Todd’s since settled on a Britpop-style mod cut, courtesy of his barber of over a year, Yuhei Nerome, who works professionally under the name Nero. According to Nero, Todd specifically asks for a hairstyle that’ll look good the moment he wakes up.
“It’s a short layer, textured haircut,” Nero says. “So basically when he just wakes up, he looks great. It’s got a nice texture to it because it’s a little bit spikier.”
The hairstyle has prompted Reddit users to seek advice for replicating the look, and earlier this year, Todd even went live on TikTok just to show off his haircut, giving viewers a 360-degree view of it. The messy bedhead look fits the artist’s cute-boy aesthetic just as much as it does his genre of dreamy, groovy, and all-around fun bedroom indie pop.
Courtesy of Nero Hair
Chatting with GQ earlier this week about his new Gap campaign, Todd mentioned his embrace of his natural hair growth, and said it was inspired by “cute” British guys. “I don’t think my hair’s supposed to be long,” he said. “I don’t feel like my hair’s obviously supposed to be completely bald.”
When Todd and Nero first met, the 22-year-old brother to pop darling Audrey Hobert had a buzzcut. Because of its length, all Nero did was shape up the hairline. Afterward, Todd reached back out because he wanted to grow out his hair, and that’s when the current mod cut came to be. To style it, Nero uses a dry texture hair paste (one that he’s currently developing under his own haircare brand, set to come out in December), and pushes the hair forward to create a messy fringe. The rest of the hair is zhuzhed to add even more texture to the haircut and allowed to fall wherever it may land. Even in the Gap campaign, Todd’s hair ends up in various states of stylish disarray.
