What is it with all these wispy moustaches suddenly decorating young men’s faces? These things, which have crawled their way on to so many upper lips, aren’t fully formed moustaches. There’s no depth to them. They’re straggly, patchy, with skin showing through them. They look as though their owners aren’t fully committed to them. Or, worse, that they are trying their best, but this apology of a moustache is all they can manage. It’s the kind of moustache you grow when puberty first makes it possible to do so, the debut facial hair with which you aim to convince publicans that you’re old enough to be served alcohol.
The only thing I can say in their favour is that they are at least equal opportunity moustaches, in that even those who can’t muster much in the way of facial hair can have a fair crack at producing one of these. But otherwise, my firm view on moustaches, for the infinitesimally little it’s worth, is to go big or go home. I’m working on a documentary about Sir Edward Elgar. Now that’s what I call a moustache. Full, bushy, yet neat. A veritable symphony of bristle. It may be that spending so much time with Sir Edward lately is what led me to suddenly start seeing these miserable creepy-crawlies sullying faces everywhere.
Initially, I felt a bit sorry for their owners. I took it they were doing it for a charity thing and, even though they plainly looked crap, were sticking with it in aid of a good cause. Respect. But I checked my calendar, and it turns out we’re in the month of June, notMovember.
Could it be, could it really be, that they think these things look good? It would seem to be so. I sought confirmation that this rubbishy apology of a moustache has been confirmed as an actual trend. And, if so, who started it, when and why?
I asked everyone I know who is trendier and more trend-aware than I am, which is almost everyone I know. So I narrowed the cohort down to various dandies of my acquaintance, my daughters, their friends, and anyone I got within range of who happened to be in their late teens or 20s.
A consensus soon emerged that the sporting of these awful ’taches is indeed a thing. But getting to the root cause of this troubling trend is quite the challenge. No sooner do you think you’ve got there than someone pops up insisting it goes back a lot further than that. I was sent a piece from the Cut, part of New York magazine, describing it thus: “It’s petite, it’s well-groomed, and like its wearer, it’s decidedly queer: the skinny mustache.” Pardoning the American spelling there, I read on with interest. It was good to know I was on to something with writers as on-trend as this. Then I checked the date: 2019. I’m just six years behind the curve, then – quite good for me. And one thing’s for sure: this trend is now close to its end. Because if a trend has become entrenched enough for my dopey ungroomed self to notice it, then it has surely peaked and the end is nigh.
For example, when I was at school there was a phase when all the other boys, as if by some agreement made behind my back, started wearing shoes called Pods. But my mum had just bought me some other new school shoes and wouldn’t hear a word about this Pods business. I kept on at her, but by the time I’d begged her to buy me some, everyone else – again by some secret agreement, apparently – had ditched their Pods and moved on. And I got laughed at for wearing them. There you go, confessions of a failed dandy.
Anyway, this piece out of New York reports a Brooklyn barber saying of this “mustache” that “its two most crucial descriptors aresubtleandunderstated”.Obviously, having applied other adjectives, I snorted at this, but reading on I started worrying I was getting into some culturally sensitive areas. A point is made about it all being a legacy of the 1960s, when lip fuzz was seen as a form of rebellion against authority, particularly military masculinity. And this new wispy 2019 version is said to have a “whiff of deviancy” about it. I don’t doubt it for a moment but, six years on, if every other young dude on the tube is wearing one, the deviancy has surely been diluted.
So what we’re seeing now is probably a revival of something from six years ago that was itself a revival of something significant that started 60 years ago. Fascinating. But I’m sorry, I still think they look crap.
It was a photograph of Benson Boone, the American singer, that started me on all this. It seems you can draw a direct line back from him, via Paul Mescal and Harry Styles, toTimothée Chalamet, upon whose face one of these aberrations appeared last year. Interestingly, if you think about it, that acute accent in Timothée’s name might be said to resemble one half of his trendsetting ’tache.
Anyway, I’m indebted to one of my Guardian colleagues for sharing with me an article about it from Vogue – not a publication I generally read. It says that Chalamet’s wispy whiskers are “not so much a symbol of masculine gruff as a free agent coming of age”. I’ve no idea what that means but it sounds about right, even though I’ve a better theory: noting that Styles, Mescal and Boone all followed where Timothée led, it struck me that what these chaps have in common is the feverish sexual desire they excite in millions of people. This must get a bit tedious after a while, so I wonder if they’re wearing these terrible ’taches to try to make themselves less attractive?
A clever move, gentlemen, if I may say so, though it doesn’t seem to have worked. The whole world’s still hot for the lot of you. And boys everywhere, poor deluded souls, thinking your magic resides in your bumfluff, are now all at it.
This must stop. They look awful. Fellas, either grow a proper one. Or get rid.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
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