In Like Fin

It’s a look worn by trendy teens, late boomers and shoe salesmen at Barneys--a hairstyle that originated in England but is now making waves stateside. It’s called the fin, and it may be coming to a salon near you, if it hasn’t already washed up.

What’s the fin?

“It’s hair that’s cut real short, and up on top it all gets pushed toward the center so it looks almost like a Mohawk,” said David Petersen, co-owner of Rudy’s Barbershop, a trend-setting salon in the Standard Hotel that does the cut.

The look isn’t always so extreme, Petersen said. It comes in a variety of lengths.

“Men are allowing us to put it on them more and more,” Petersen said. He estimated that 30% to 40% of Rudy’s male clients, who include many from the music and entertainment industries, get the fin in some form or other.

“It’s sort of the subtlety that works,” said Pete D., co-owner of Cuts Soho, in a telephone interview from the London salon credited with pioneering the look. “If you don’t push [the hair] up, you can lay it flat. If you work at a bank, you can get by on a daily basis and then do something for the evening.”

Two years ago, a group of stylists at Cuts Soho developed the look and put the fin on Fran Healy, lead singer for the British pop group Travis. In 1999, Healy won the haircut of the year award from the music magazine Melody Maker, and the fin took off in Britain.

“It just takes a pop star to have it, and suddenly everyone’s talking about it,” said Pete D., whose current clients include electronic music producer William Orbit and the drum and bass artist Goldie. He said the fin is popular because “it was the first different haircut that was in the realm of good taste and sort of suited a lot of people.”

It takes about a year from the time a hairstyle is created until it is picked up by the mainstream, according to Christa Sears, director of Menswork, a Boulder, Colo.-based men’s haircutting academy that began teaching how to cut the style a year ago.

“Now [the fin] is a lot more acceptable and much more common,” she said.

Petersen said he first learned how to do the fin last year at Menswork.

“I thought it was great,” said Petersen. “I came home with the fin.” And he’s still wearing it, though he doesn’t always style it up.

Other L.A. salons also do the cut, but they don’t necessarily call it the same thing. Linda Husjord, a manager at Lather on Fairfax, said no one has come to her salon asking for the fin by name. But, she said, clients often request cuts that are “imprecise, highly texturized, choppy and sticking up,” like the fin.

The style is a move away from what Petersen calls “the push and smush--really short hair that comes toward the front and flips up.

“Sometimes when you catch a side profile of a guy with a huge flip, it looks like a ramp,” he added.

Unlike women’s ‘dos, men’s hairstyles do not ordinarily have names. When they do, the styles are somewhat dubious in their fashion worthiness, like the much-maligned mullet (as worn by Adam Sandler in “The Wedding Singer”) and the Caesar (a style George Clooney made popular and which is a precursor to the fin in the U.S.).

What is now called the fin was originally known as the Buddha hawk, a combination of two earlier hairstyles Cuts Soho helped popularize--the Buddha (which has “the same sort of shape, with a little more hair centered around the crown”) and the Mohawk.

The term “fin” came from the street, according to Sears.

So, what is the next wave, after the fin?

According to Sears, it is the Desic 2000, a derivative of the fin that she is previewing in L.A. this weekend as part of the International Cosmetology Expo, a hairdressers’ convention.

“It’s like the old Steve McQueen look, where hair was cropped really, really short in the front, with a little height and texture on the crown, so from the profile it looked almost pointed or spheric.”

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Susan Carpenter can be reached by e-mail at susan.carpenter@latimes.com.