There used to be a couple of absolute certainties I could hang my hat on. One, if I turned on a Man City game, Erling Haaland would be booting a ball clean through some poor player’s skull, and his looped half-up, half-down ponytail would be at the scene of the crime. Two, if I saw a photo of Connor Storrie, I would be seized with some rabid gender envy, caused mostly by his head of cherubic curls.
Then, something happened over the weekend. Haaland took to Instagram with a series of unhinged posts (his speciality!) showing his long blond hair being shorn off. Someone who doesn’t get it commented, “An angel lost his wings.” Someone who does wrote, “Very, very, very nice.”
And because buzz cuts fall in pairs, a picture was also posted to X of Connor Storrie, his bouncy, curly mullet gone. Speculation puts him in the middle of filming Heated Rivalry season two, so there’s potentially buzz-adjacent plots unfolding.
Just like the recent eclipse, the newly bald heads of two big stars have overlapped in the sky, and everyone is turning to look. (Only this time, no one’s going partially blind! We hope!) But a buzz has always been the cool guy’s way to shake things up. My pal Charlie Calver, who heads up content down under for GQ Australia, has long called his yearly summer buzz the big “refresh.” He naturally has floppy Hugh Grant hair, so whenever he used to stroll into the office just as the days were hotting up, skull on show, it felt like the turning of the season. “When we travel, move houses, or even just switch up our wardrobe, we get addicted,” wrote Charlie about his buzzcut for GQ. “We love the feeling of newness. And while it’s not a career change or huge move, shaving your head creates a certain amount of revolution.”
Robin Key, who is British GQ’s visuals director and whose crew cut is staring at me over the top of his computer, has had his short hair for three years. “I like that it’s completely effortless; I can just get out of bed and it’s good to go,” he says of it. “When it gets a little longer, sometimes I use a little product in it, but that’s as complicated as it gets. I’d definitely recommend if you want a sharp, fuss-free look.”
