A specific shop. Joe Cirello’s barbershop on Snyder Avenue in South Philadelphia, December 1940. A high school junior is sitting in the chair. Cirello, a thirty-two-year-old Italian-American barber who has been cutting hair in the neighborhood for ten years, has just finished combing the boy’s hair back from both sides, meeting in a vertical seam down the center back of his head. The shape resembles a duck’s tail. Cirello has been working on this cut for weeks, refining the angle of the comb-back so that the seam holds when the customer leaves the chair. The boy looks in the mirror. Cirello tells him the name he has in mind for the cut. They both laugh. Fifteen years later, every American teenager will know what a DA is. The American man’s hairstyle has not had a moment like this in two centuries.
The DA: Joe Cirello, Philadelphia, 1940
The invention. Joe Cirello (1908-2003) was an Italian-American barber working at 1832 Snyder Avenue in South Philadelphia in the late 1930s. He developed a cut in which the hair on both sides of the head was combed straight back from the ear forward and met in a vertical seam down the center of the back of the head. The resulting shape resembled the rear feathering of a duck and was named on that basis. The full name, “duck’s ass,” was considered vulgar in 1940, and the cut was almost always called the DA in print and in barbershop conversation.
Cirello held a brief regional reputation as the inventor through the 1940s, with several Philadelphia newspapers running profiles. The cut spread through Philadelphia in the early 1940s, reached New York and Chicago by 1947, and was a national teenage standard by 1953.
Cirello continued cutting hair at the same Snyder Avenue location into the 1970s. He never trademarked the cut, never licensed it, and never received royalties on its eventual global commercial life. He gave press interviews about being the inventor into his eighties and seemed mildly amused that no one had paid him for the idea.
The Pompadour
The other half of the look. The pompadour as a hairstyle takes its name from Madame de Pompadour (born Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, 1721-1764), the official chief mistress of Louis XV of France, who wore her hair brushed up and back from the forehead in a tall sculptural style. The form was a women’s hairstyle for its first century and a half, with men only beginning to adopt it in the late nineteenth century. It was a respectable middle-class men’s style through the first half of the twentieth century, worn by figures from Theodore Roosevelt to Cary Grant in low-profile versions that emphasized the brushed-back motion without exaggerating the height.
The 1950s revival distinguished itself from the older respectable pompadour by exaggerating the volume on top, shortening the sides, and pushing the front into a high sculptural wave that crested two to three inches above the forehead. The cut required hair four to six inches long on top, cut close to the skin on the lower sides, and brushed up and back from the front with pomade holding the shape against gravity.
Combined with the DA at the back, the total silhouette produced the canonical 1950s teenage profile: high in front, vertical down the back, with razor-sharp edges between the longer top and shorter sides. The cut was structurally architectural and could be diagrammed on graph paper.
The Pomades
The product industry that made the style possible. Brylcreem, manufactured by County Chemicals in Birmingham, England, since 1928, was the dominant white-market product through the 1940s and 1950s. The slogan “A Little Dab’ll Do Ya” ran on American radio and television advertising through the entire decade and became a recognizable cultural phrase.
Vitalis, introduced by Bristol-Myers in 1934, offered an alcohol-based alternative for men who disliked the heavy greasiness of petroleum pomades. Wildroot Cream-Oil, in production since 1911, ran a popular jingle (“Get Wildroot Cream-Oil, Charlie”) that played on American radio for two decades.
The actual product was petroleum jelly, mineral oil, lanolin, beeswax, and fragrance, mixed in varying ratios depending on the brand’s preferred hold strength. A tin of pomade in 1955 cost roughly twenty-five cents to one dollar at the drugstore, depending on size and brand. The application required warming the pomade in the hands until it softened, working it through dry or slightly damp hair, and combing the hair into the desired shape while the pomade was still pliable.
Most working-class American teenagers in 1955 owned at least one tin. Many owned two or three, for different occasions: a softer hold for school, a heavier hold for Friday night. The pomade industry shipped tens of millions of units per year through the 1950s.
The Black Origin
The hair-grease tradition that the Greaser style drew on. American Black men’s grooming had been built around pomades for decades before white teenagers picked up the practice. The conk, a chemically straightened style created with lye-based relaxers and then dressed with pomade into a slicked-back wave, was the standard look for Black male performers from the 1930s through the early 1960s. Cab Calloway, Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and James Brown all wore conks at the height of their careers.
Malcolm X devoted several pages of his 1965 autobiography to a furious account of his own teenage conk and the chemical burns it caused. He framed the conk as Black self-hatred under the cover of grooming, a position that contributed to the style’s gradual decline in Black popular music through the late 1960s.
The pomade brands that served the Black market were older and better-distributed than the white brands. Murray’s Superior Pomade, founded in Chicago in 1925, was the dominant product in Black barbershops by the 1940s. Royal Crown Pomade and Dixie Peach Pomade followed. White teenagers in the early 1950s discovered Murray’s and Royal Crown through drugstore distribution and used them alongside Brylcreem. The Greaser look was, among its other components, a partial and unacknowledged adoption from Black male grooming culture.
The Movie Stars
The mass-market arrival of the Greaser look came through three actors and one singer in three years.
Marlon Brando played Johnny Strabler, leader of a motorcycle gang, in The Wild One (December 1953), wearing a black leather Schott Perfecto jacket, white t-shirt, blue jeans, and a heavy slicked-back pompadour. The film was banned in Britain for fourteen years on the grounds that it would encourage juvenile delinquency. Brando’s pompadour in the film was darker and more sculpturally exaggerated than anything he had worn in previous roles, and the gang members behind him wore variations of the same cut.
James Dean played Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (October 1955), wearing a red Harrington jacket, white t-shirt, blue jeans, and a softer, looser pompadour that signaled middle-class rather than working-class adolescence. The film was released a month after Dean’s death in a Porsche 550 Spyder crash on September 30, 1955, and made him the canonical figure of American teenage alienation.
Elvis Presley emerged from Sun Records in Memphis through 1954 and 1955 and signed to RCA in November 1955. His first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on September 9, 1956 drew an estimated 60 million viewers, roughly eighty percent of the American television-owning population at the time, and showed his fully developed pompadour-and-DA combination, dyed black, in close-up. Within weeks, American barbershops were receiving requests for “the Elvis.” Within a year, a generation of young men had asked their barbers for the cut.
The Barbershop
The institutional infrastructure. The independent neighborhood barbershop in 1955 was the central male grooming venue in the United States, with no significant competition from chains, salons, or unisex shops. American working-class neighborhoods typically had a barbershop on every commercial block.
A twenty-five-cent haircut in 1955 included a wash, a cut, a comb-out, and a pomade application, finished in about twenty minutes. The cape, the chair, the mirror, the comb sterilizer, the strop, the talcum powder, and the row of pomade jars on the back shelf were standard equipment. Some shops had a separate boy’s chair (often shaped as a carousel horse, a fire truck, or a car) for younger customers.
The four-week cycle was a structural reality. The pompadour required precise cutting to maintain the volume-on-top, short-on-sides ratio, and the DA required the seam at the back to be re-cut as the hair grew out. A Greaser visited his barber once a month for the entire commercial life of the style. The barber knew the customer’s family, his job, his school, his girlfriend, and his preferences in pomade.
The relationship was as durable as the style. Many of the men who first got DA cuts in the late 1940s continued going to the same barbers for the same cuts into the 1980s, after the style had been out of mainstream fashion for fifteen years and the barbers were themselves in their seventies.
The Revival Cycle
The long afterlife. The Greaser look went out of mainstream fashion by 1965, replaced by the longer hair of the British Invasion and the counterculture. It persisted in working-class subcultures, including rockabilly, biker, and lowrider scenes, without interruption from 1955 to the present.
The first major nostalgia wave came in the early 1970s with George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973), the television series Happy Days (1974-1984), and the Broadway musical Grease (1971) and its film adaptation (1978). The Greaser was recoded as nostalgic Americana for an audience that mostly had not lived through the original moment. Henry Winkler’s Fonzie on Happy Days became the canonical post-original Greaser image for an entire generation of children watching after-school reruns.
Francis Ford Coppola’s film of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1983) extended the nostalgia into Reagan-era cinema, with Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Ralph Macchio in early-career roles.
The 2007-2015 run of Mad Men and the simultaneous rise of artisanal barbershops in major American cities triggered a second pompadour revival that has continued into the 2020s. By 2026, the cut is back in continuous production at every American barbershop with a fade specialization, often executed without any awareness of its working-class Italian-American origin or its Black pomade lineage.