The Eton crop is a type of short, slicked-down, blunt crop hairstyle.^[1] It became popular during the 1920s because it was ideal to showcase the shape of cloche hats.^[1] It was worn by Josephine Baker, among others.^[1] The name is supposed to derive from its similarity to a hairstyle popular with schoolboys at Eton.^[2]

The Eton crop appears to have emerged in Britain in the mid-1920s: the first use of the phrase in The Times is in September 1926. It was a severe hairstyle, emphasising the shape of the head and focusing interest on the face. By June 1927 Margot Asquith, Lady Oxford, was deriding it: ""Women with neither backs nor tops to their heads, and faces as large as hams, appear at the King's Drawing Rooms with the nuque of their necks blue from shaving.."^[3]. By 1930 it seems to have become outmoded among the most fashionable. A critic reviewing a collection of society portraits notes: "Hairdressing is in a state of transition. There is an Eton crop, there are many soft shingles, and there are a few heads where the hair is being let grow."^[4]

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