The Fade Haircut Is Dead

In 2025, the barber Julius Arriola met up with his client Skrillex. Typically the DJ, whose real name is Sonny John Moore, would ask for his usual: a signature undercut that preserved his shoulder-length hair. But that day, Arriola recalls, he was adamant about one thing: “I want no fade.”

Arriola, a co-founder of the haircare brand STMNT, heard the message loud and clear. The result, which the musician officially debuted at Ultra Music Festival that year, was a medium-short textured crop style that still showed some dramatic flair while headbanging. Since then, Arriola says Skrillex has quickly become a recurring celebrity photo that clients come in with as haircut inspiration. Between trendy haircuts like boy bangs, mini-mullets, and shags, 2026 appears to be leaving fades in the past.

For at least the last decade, tight fades—hairstyles marked by dramatically short sides, sometimes to the skin, that gradually get longer to the top of the head—as well as highly sculpted quiffs and the occasional hard part became the defining look for an era marked by a clean-cut aesthetic. David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo loomed large as style icons. With a whiff of a cool breeze on their scalp, dudes would dap each other up at the sign of a recent trip to the barbershop. There was no bigger compliment you could give a guy a few years ago than “clean fade, bro.”

“[Fades look] kinda badass,” celebrity hairstylist and BLVD & CO brand ambassador Jerrod Roberts says. “I think guys love the feeling of getting a fresh fade and the way the sides of your head feel after a fresh haircut.”

But as recently as fall of 2025, Roberts noticed a shift away from the fade haircut, and instead a shift toward longer hairstyles. “I’m starting to see most of my clients who have a fade ask me how they can grow out their hair, or what longer styles they could realistically achieve,” he says.

It’s a gradual change that Arriola theorizes has been happening ever since the COVID lockdown days of 2020. Trapped inside for months with no access to a stylist, men were either going without haircuts altogether (think Bo Burnham in Inside) or taking a razor to their head and going full buzzcut. Either way, men were doing stuff with their hair that they had never done before. And when the barbershops started opening back up, they thought of their hair as more of a canvas.

“I think when I translate what it means to say it’s the ‘death of the fade,’ it’s just more so the death of a default,” Arriola says. “Men were forced to grow their hair out which meant they got to see how their hair looks in longer lengths and see also what type of texture they have in their hair. There was an opportunity for education by going to the barber or the stylist and asking, ‘Hey, I got a lot of this hair, what can I do for it before I resort to the default.’”