In the 12 years since my last trip to Iraq, much has changed. Back then as a producer for an American news network, trips into the country required either close coordination with the channel’s private security or a rendezvous with coalition and/or Iraqi forces (or a combination of both), a bulletproof vest, an armored car and steely nerves.

Nowadays, depending on where exactly you’re headed, you need none of the above. Speciality shops and glittering malls are popping up in places like Baghdad’s trendy Mansour district, which was once the domain of towering concrete security barriers and heavily armed checkpoints.

The police and military are still there, but much less conspicuous. It’s now possible as a foreigner to stroll the shopping prescient’s wide sidewalks in the fading afternoon light with scant consideration for the potential threat of a car bomb or kidnapping. There, families enjoy the late afternoon ambience along with girls in high colorful headscarves and knots of teenage boys in tight jeans walking hand-in-hand where once few dared to congregate.

It would be the height of naivety to think that the danger has gone for good, but it’s fair to say, after the recent fall of  ISIL’s northern bastion of Mosul, it has significantly abated.

Setting aside the city’s growing confidence in a brighter future in the post-ISIL era, shiny new imported cars and modern clothes, there is one change that has happened in the last 12 years that is both intricate in its execution and ubiquitous at the same time, and it’s all about the hair. Teenage men and a lot of older ones as well have fallen in love with "big hair." Or to give it its local name: The Spikey.

Decades after British punk music fans made the Mohawk cool, it is back in Baghdad. Towering hair, I’m reliably informed by my local fixer, is something that started to take root here a few years ago. Like young people the world over, Iraqi adolescents, he told me, are sponges for “the latest thing,” and hairstyles it would seem are at the forefront of growing Western influence in this once tightly controlled society.

To say some have embraced the "free the hair" movement with gusto would be an understatement. Some Spikies are so tall they resemble shark fins, cutting a path through other less ornate heads in Baghdad’s bustling old street markets and the new pristine cafes and arcades.

It’s anyone’s guess who the progenitor might have been for this new fashion "must have," but given the Iraqi male’s passion for everything football, it wouldn’t be hard to make the connection between The Spikey and one or more players from England’s Premier League, Germany’s Bundesliga or Spain’s La Liga soccer tournaments. Others, including those we spoke to on the campus of Baghdad University, argued it was a certain Canadian singer-songwriter.

Whatever the origin, it’s hard not to notice things have changed in Iraq for a generation that might (and it’s a big might) not have to worry every time they leave their homes to go to school, meet friends or go to work. Their parents have lived through four wars in living memory, the latest being a bloody struggle to subdue the threat of ISIL, which didn’t tolerate music let alone coiffed looks. 

Maybe, for the first time in a long time, Iraq’s young people can shrug off the weight of the past 15 years to make a bold statement about the direction their heads and the country is headed, by creating a hipster heaven even the likes of Justin Bieber might envy.