The name, of course, is a play on the mohawk style, which it resembles only in principle: The hair is noticeably longer on top than on the sides. But whereas a proper mohawk is completely shaved on the sides and drastically high in the middle, high enough to require egg whites or Elmer's glue to hold its shape, the fauxhawk simply requires hair that's longer where the mohawk would be.
—Whet Moser, "Last trends of summer: The fauxhawk," Chicago Tribune, August 26, 2003
"Is it Everclear?" she asks urgently. "Are they next?"
"No, it's just Spacehog," says a frail-looking, black-haired moppet with a faux-hawk.
—Silke Tudor, "Night Crawler," SF Weekly, August 7, 1996
As the example citation says, a fauxhawk is a kind of fake mohawk which, if you somehow missed the whole punk thing, is a hairstyle in which the head is shaved except for a strip of hair across the top. The word mohawk has been strutting its stuff in the English language since about 1950.
If any one person can be blamed, er, I mean, credited with popularizing the fauxhawk, it's soccer star David Beckham, who sported the 'do during the 2002 World Cup tournament. (That's him on the left.) In fact, in some parts of the world this style is called the Beckham.
