How The Beatles’ Iconic Mop Top Hairstyle Was Formed

The Fab Four's individual looks changed dramatically over the years, with each laying down their own unique fashion styles, from John Lennon's velvet ensemble and Paul McCartney's Fair Isle vest to Ringo Starr's white denim jacket and George Harrison's purple striped suit.

Arguably the band's most instantly recognizable style of all, however, must surely be their collective “mop top” hairstyles. This is the look that took The Beatles to international stardom, and to understand its origins, we have to go back to their early days, when the future superstars were learning their trade the hard way in Hamburg, Germany.

Back to the Beginnings

By 1960, the band had been gigging around their native Liverpool for some time, initially as Johnny and the Moondogs or the Rainbows, then the Silver Beetles, and finally, just the Beatles. They were a five-piece back then, with Ringo Starr yet to come aboard and Harrison, McCartney, and Lennon joined by drummer Pete Best and bassist Stuart Sutcliffe.

In summer of that year, the group's unofficial manager, Allan Williams, arranged for a 3.5-month residency for the young lads at Bruno Koschmider's Indra club in Hamburg. They arrived there on the evening of August 17 and took their first steps into what must have seemed like an entirely new world. Hamburg was a neon-lit hub for clubs and all kinds of nightlife. Harrison would later recall: “Hamburg was really like our apprenticeship, learning how to play in front of people.”

A German Influence

It's at this point that German artist and photographer Astrid Kirchherr entered the story. Born in 1938, Kirchherr had grown up in Hamburg and become involved in its thriving art scene. Her introduction to The Beatles came via Stuart Sutcliffe, whom she met in a bar in the city (Kirchherr would later become engaged to Sutcliffe until his tragic early death in 1962).

Her photos of the group from that era have since become highly significant, and she is often credited with having invented the band's mop top look. Kirchherr disputed this, as outlined in Keith Bradman's 2000 book The Beatles Off The Record, in which she explained that it was a very popular hairstyle in Germany at the time, although also confirming that it was she who cut Sutcliffe's hair in this fashion, a style soon copied by Lennon and McCartney.

“All my friends in art school used to run around with this sort of, what [you’d now] call Beatles haircut,” Kirchherr told the BBC in 1995, as reported by Vogue. “And my [first] boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, had this hairstyle, and Stuart [Sutcliffe] liked it very, very much. He was the first one who really got the nerve to get the Brylcreem out of his hair and [ask] me to cut his hair for him.”

The Beatles in their classic formation of Lennon, McCartney, Starr, and Harrison, would keep their distinctive hairdos in place until the mid-1960s, by which time they had become the biggest act on the planet.

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