Mustache is reborn with a purpose that goes from fashion to authority – 06/19/2023 – Equilíbrio

About six months ago, Micah Fitzerman-Blue, a screenwriter from Los Angeles, was shaving his beard when, as he got to the part between his nose and upper lip, he thought, “What if I just stop?”

“At first I was embarrassed, because I had never used just the mustache,” he says. But after confirming that his wife didn’t hate them and realizing how commonplace they’ve become in his neighborhood, Echo Park, he adopted the look. “I turned 40 this year and have two young children, and that makes me feel more like a dad, but a fun dad,” he says.

He is not the only one. The moustache, capable of evoking everything from gruff masculinity to flamboyant irony and sincere fatherly glee, is enjoying one of its periodic rebirths.

“When I’m on the subway any day, I look around and see five other people within a 10-foot radius with mustaches,” says actor Jimmy Brewer, 27, of New York, who grew a mustache while on vacation seven months ago. back. Then he landed a role in the Broadway musical “Shucked” and was asked to keep the mustache until the end of his contract. “I’ve always admired them in other men because they seem to be more self-confident,” he says.

While it’s difficult to separate data on mustaches from data on facial hair trends in general, industry professionals say this option has grown sharply recently. Once only worn by queer guys, porn stars, counterculture icons or old-fashioned uncles, the mustache is becoming a fad for facial hair again.

There are many reasons. The mustache is masculine but fun in a world enjoying new ways to engage with gendered styles. It was about to make a comeback after a decade where every man sported a beard, anyway, and the quarantine has allowed many to try it and realize they like it.

“It started to pick up a lot more momentum in the last year, especially after ‘Top Gun’ came out,” says Matty Conrad, who runs several barbershops in Vancouver, Canada, as well as a popular YouTube channel dedicated to facial care. “I think the mustache today is what the beard was in 2010. But if it ends up having that staying power, people who adopted it for the ‘wow’ factor will start looking for something else.”

Nicky Austin, the hair and makeup stylist responsible for maintaining Ted Lasso’s iconic mustache, attributes the increase in mustaches among her Los Angeles clients to the spread of beard culture, as well as a new openness to grooming.

“I know men who go to the barber every weekend to keep their hair looking fresh, which would have been unheard of 20 years ago,” she says, adding that those with baldness often find mustaches a positive style change.

Mustaches became more common in gay spaces in the late 2010s, especially the wispy ones that complemented the dominant groomed and sexy, Tom of Finland-style leather and harness aesthetic. And they might have remained on the edge of mainstream popularity had the pandemic not hit. During this time, men began to transition from beards to standalone mustaches, bringing others along for the ride.

“Quarantine has definitely freed me from having to deal with that awkward in-between phase that always kept me from growing one,” says Lucas Johnson, an English teacher in Brooklyn who adopted a thick, bushy mustache two years ago. “As someone in my late 20s, it’s a great way to feel on trend while still feeling like I’m rising into a more mature adult age.”

He also appreciates his changing associations. “The mustache denotes authority, but it also suggests a certain amount of silliness,” he says. “It’s very masculine, but it’s also very flamboyant and quietly gay. The entire gender spectrum is obsessed with my mustache, and so am I.”

The popularity of the mustache has always been especially susceptible to cultural icons and current trends. In the early 1900s, mustaches were often elaborate, such as Theodore Roosevelt’s sea lion style or the waxed ends of the English mustache (think Archduke Franz Ferdinand), ironically revived, albeit briefly, in the early 1980s, by youths who wore braces across the US.

Until 1916, British soldiers were prohibited from shaving their upper lip, perhaps because of the mustache’s deep association with virility and strength.

More artificial styles were also easy to mock. Charlie Chaplin’s toothbrush moustache, that little patch above the lip, was adopted specifically for its humorous appeal, before it became associated with Hitler and forever lost its place in the fashion cycle.

After the shaved beards of the 1950s, the mustache became the counterculture face item of choice for diverse groups considered subversive — long-haired hippies, Marxists, gays. Songwriter and singer Freddie Mercury sported one of the most iconic mustaches of the century.

As the sharp style divide between the mainstream and the counterculture began to blur in the 1970s and 1980s, the mustache became associated with male swagger and was found on the faces of Burt Reynolds, Tom Selleck, Sam Elliott and others. Not everyone managed to grow it, which was always part of its appeal, but these hyper-masculine associations lent themselves to exaggeration, while the mustache was amusingly adopted into gay culture. It has also spread throughout the porn industry, giving it an air of degeneracy.

Of course, in many places, such as the Middle East and Mexico, the mustache absorbed its own set of rich associations, and these were often carried over to the US, giving the style different meanings for different groups.

For black Americans, its evocation of authority and assiduousness made the mustache especially popular with civil rights-era leaders, including Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr., before it lost favor in the 1970s. (As Wesley Morris detailed in a 2020 essay in The New York Times, remains a vivid way to engage with black identity.)

By the end of the 1990s, the mustache had gone so deeply out of fashion that few thought it would ever make a comeback. But as a critical mass of wearers formed, the style slowly shed the subcultural associations it took on in the 1980s, leading more people to imagine it on their own face.

Today, two options are proving particularly popular: a chevron (“zigzag”), like the one worn by Ron Swanson in “Parks and Recreation,” and the bushy mustache embedded in a stubble beard (think Henry Cavil, The Weeknd, or any student PhD in Brooklyn). More manicured choices, including the pencil mustache, the parted or waxed ends, remain the domain of the ablest among us.

But any style choice that significantly changes someone’s face is going to look a little comical, ironic, and fun. And in a world that revisits the core of what it means to be masculinity, those associations can be welcome too.

As the mustache becomes more popular, many men find they know very little about maintaining it. What style works for their face? How should it be trimmed? How long does it take to grow?

“Just because a guy wants something doesn’t necessarily mean it suits his face shape, hair texture or growth type,” says Conrad, the Vancouver-based barber. “Part of the story is knowing how to use what you have.”

But small tweaks can have a big impact. The only difference, he says, between that well-mannered Ted Lasso mustache and the tough Burt Reynolds mustache is a subtle design.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves