What do you consider a ‘crew cut’? Is it a ‘buzz cut’, in which all of the hair is the same (short) length? Or is it like a ‘flat top’ in that the sides and back are short (‘buzzed’) and longer at the front, without the top of the hair being flat? What do you call Robert F. Kennedy’s haircut, which is short on the sides and back and decidedly long in front? When I was a kid barbers would have a shart showing a typical haircut of the 1960s called a ‘Men’s Haircut’. Did that have a common name?
A ‘crew cut’ says to me a flat-top, or the ‘high and tight’ which my Marine son gets. A total all-over short short we call a ‘buzz’. I’m sure there’s a name for JFK’s cut - which my brother sported all through grade school - but it escapes me. In a related aside, our youngest son is wearing a fetching 'do which is like the ‘high and tight’ in that it is short on the sides and back but has a very short ‘mohawk’ ridge up the center of the back and on the top. I like it.
Here’s a page that attempts to differentiate the various types of crewcuts. The basic round-headed shorty cut seems to be called, in increasing order of shortness, Ivy League/Princeton, crew, butch, and burr.
I myself favor a sort of Princeton/Caesar hybrid during the warm months. I’m balding, and I sweat like a beer keg, but I happen to be prejudiced against buzzcuts, which make too many men look like thugs.
I’ve always assumed it was another name for a buzzcut. Any barber around here will assume that you want your hair clipping all over, if you ask for a crew cut.
The crew cut that we wore in the '50s was not a flat top, and not a fade. It was a little longer than a buzz cut, and was made to stand up at the front hairline with a dab of pomade. I don’t recall any difference between a crew cut and a butch.
I got a 1950s-style flat top once. Pretty severe, but looked pretty good after a couple of months.
Here is a photo of a men’s crew from the 1950s, standing next to their shell. Another picture here shows how pervasive the cut was in those days among rowers. According to Wikipedia the fad for the haircut came about from the Yale crew, who wore their hair short so that they would look different from Yale’s other star athletes – the football team. This whole page has dozens of historical photos of U. Washington’s crew team from the era of de rigeur crew cuts.
Yale doesn’t seem to have any photos of their rowers from that era online that I could find with a quick search, but a crew cut is pretty clearly short on the sides, flat on top, and with a little bit of a cliff up front.
Mr Triangle looks oddly like Peter Lorre.