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What do you all think started the "short hair" trend?
What started the tradition of men having short hair and woman having long hair?
It's a shame to read a comment on that page repeating the false myth that "But until recently, as recent at World War I, suddenly it became a norm in the west for men to have short hair."
That's just rubbish. Short hair was common for men from the beginning of the 19th century and it became highly fashionable at least as early as the 1870s. By the 1890s, short hair for men had become almost universal and men with long hair (such as Oscar Wilde) were very much the exception.
The 'norm' began decades before World War I!
Damon
I think many/most of the answers are a bit off the mark.
The Romans were a big influence on Western attitudes to hair, mainly through St. Paul. Just by virtue of what he wrote in the Bible a lot of Christians believed it was a religious duty to follow convention on hair length. Mistakenly IMHO, but I am an atheist, so it's a bit academic.
OTOH, earlier generations had a very different idea of what was meant by short and long. At one time they thought a man with shoulder length hair had short hair, and we can verify this by reading what they wrote at the time.
Colonialism explains similar attitudes in other civilisations to a very large extent.
And IME there are about 5% of men with at least shoulder length hair, which is considered long today, but would have been considered short in, say, the 15th century.