It’s a long story, for another blog.īut, time heals all wounds, and in 2023, mustaches are back in a big way, possibly surpassing beards as the coolest facial hair style.īut before you join the mustachioed ranks, let’s get you squared away with finding a mustache style that works for you. The truth is, the mustache’s fall from grace is a little deeper than that. Add to that a couple of creeps and a few pornstars, and well, you know the rest. Then your dad grew one, and suddenly the mustache was nothing more than Old Milwaukee and cheese curds. Teddy Roosevelt took a bullet while delivering a speech, dusted himself off, and finished the speech - while wearing one hell of a mustache! Colonel Joshua Chamberlain wore a walrus mustache that was so long it flapped in the wind as he yelled, “ bayonet!” and held the Union flank at Gettysburg. There’s always been a spirit of rebellion behind mustaches - the exception being its peak popularity in the 1980s when the mustache was as commonplace as iPhones are today. Think of the only working-class person we ever met on Friends it was their mustachioed super).Look, we love beards at Beardbrand, but the mustache is damn cool. At the same time, it became the aesthetic of the average Joe, mutating from the look of a “foreigner” who back in the day might have pushed bolshevism in imagined bars and back alleys to one of the American working man. It became both a symbol of an older-school, tough-guy virility (see Burt Reynolds and Charles Bronson) as well as refined way to express new sensitivities and creative personas (Sonny Bono and Stan Lee). A mustache became a way to assert one’s free past, but also to fit in. The hair heads got trimmed, or simply said adieu. Rock became pop, uptown started to meet downtown, and as the free-love ‘60s gave way to the key-party ‘70s, former hippies graduated law school and moved to the suburbs. And as cool took over and the counterculture became mainstream, those politics got complex. Kodachrome photograph of Clark Gable taken on a visit to the Kodak factory at Harrow, Middlesex, by JCA Redhead during World War II. And then a very famous mustachioed German made the whole enterprise rather unattractive for a good while. Meanwhile, you couldn’t work for Disney if you had a ‘stache, even though Walt himself famously had one. Leading men like Clark Gable sported well-kept little numbers. There’s some back-and-forth in the ‘20s and ‘30s. And if you couldn’t grow a mustache, they’d give you one (made of goat hair). At the outbreak of World War I, to enlist in the British Army you had to have a mustache, says Dr. Presidents from Grant (elected in 1869) to Taft (who departed in 1914) sported the ‘stache, including Grover Cleveland (both times). “Suddenly, they’re working under bosses in offices and factories.” At the same time, soldiers were coming back from the Crimean war sporting mustaches, which were associated with particular regiments, and it became a popular expression of extreme masculinity (alongside many bogus health claims, like that they’d keep disease from getting up your nose). Alun Whitey, another facial hair expert and lecturer in history at the University of Exeter. “For Victorian men, their role is out among nature, master of their domains,” says Dr. It’s why mustaches raged in with the modern age: Industrialization, it seems, struck some as quite emasculating. Throughout their history, men and their mustaches have often met over masculinity, or the loss thereof. Duke of the Abruzzi, Italian mountaineer and explorer, late 19th-early 20th century.
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