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Moustaches: outmoded facial furniture or essential fashion adornment?
Kevin Braddock give up shaving and finds out
It's a well-known fact that only a few types of men wear moustaches
today:
- Gay men.
- Men in the forces.
- Islamic, Hindu or Latin men.
- Nutters.
One more category can now be added:
- Men who are trying too hard
to be fashionable.
Flick through the pages of this or any other style magazine and
you'll notice that nothing short of a tonsorial revolution is afoot:
the rehabilition of the ’tache into the modern male style
lexicon. This is all very well if you happened to be the upwards
of 6ft tall with a bone structure like cut glass. If you happened
to be an anglo-saxon C of E civilian heterosexual who doesn't work
in modelling, it's an entirely different matter.
The Fash ’Tache is everywhere, including, for the last month,
on my top lip. This relatively outré addition to my face
has been a risky business. Where I'm from (near Wales), wearing
a moustache is tantamount to etching 'I want to fight you: please
punch me now' onto your forehead. Des Lynam notwithstanding, it
signals an aggressive, cocksure masculinity - especially on women.
What the mullet was to fashion before its recent salvage, the tache
is to the gender-neutrality of our times.
Another problem is the confusing signals and associations it gives
off. You know where you are with a goatee (which says: ‘I’m
hip to the beat of youth culture, er, dude!’) or a full beard
(‘I just want to bake bread, take in Dogme films and hide
my slumping jawline’). Consider the tache though: will it
make me look gay? Or Just Gay Enough? Will anyone attractive want
to kiss me ever again? Will I be conscripted on the spot? And why
does the girl in Starbucks keep laughing at me all the time?
This being such a chappish moment, you'd imagine that wearing
a moustache was a credible tonsorial option, and not just a desperate
attempt to cultivate loucheness. If we can now head out in a suit
jacket without being laughed at (much), then really, the tache's
new cool ought to be a ticket to instant, what-the-hell rakishness,
with no more effort required than ignoring your razor for a fortnight.
In this era of Total Hair Abandon (think Mullet, bedhead, tramlines),
I reason, what's the problem with a few whiskers under the nose?
I grasp the nettle and emerge after a few weeks of intense facial
acivity with my own tribute to some of fashion's greats - photographer
Terry Richardson, actor Terry-Thomas and Corrie's Terry Duckworth
- which I dub 'The Terry'. It lacks the lush density of a Saddam
or the flamboyance of a Dali, sure, but neverthless conjures a
cross-combination of some well-known character types: Generic Euroman,
Recently Demobbed Squaddie, Asian Shopkeeper. A functional, unfussy
and, I like to think, plucky take on fashion’s Hairy Lipterpillar ‘vibe’.
‘Are you growing a moustache,’ someone quizzes me. ‘It
looks good!’. This person was a colleague, and he appeared
to mean it. A beard-wearer, mind, he has a positive disposition.
Among women, reactions have ranged from mild amusement (‘You
look weird. Do bits get caught in it when you eat?’) to sympathetic
(‘Nearly there!’) to full recoiling-in-horror (‘Tssssrrgggh!
Get rid of it NOW! You look like a paedophile or something.!’)
Do I look fashionable?
‘No.’
At a bar, Dee, 26, scrutinises me, and then asks if I'm Welsh.
I reply that I'm not. She laughs. 'You just looks so... Welsh.'
At length, I explain how my 'Terry' is, in fact, the asbolute cutting
edge of fashion. She laughs some more. It begins to hurt.
I walk into Old Compton Street, the very coalface of moustache-wearing,
one evening to treat London’s gay village to my Terry. Here,
I’m regarded with clinical eyes, and my moustache becomes
the mark of me for the few other moustachioed ‘guys’ who’ve
staggered into a world where the svelte and the hairless now predominate.
In fact, I feel even more of a pariah here than in hetero context.
When I realise a blond man has been staring fixedly at me for more
than ten minutes, I roll up my copy of The Face and split. Not
that I’m pejudiced or anything. Hey - some of my best friends
are weirdos.
There’s a the basic practicality ensuring that the Terry
will remain a minority interest – you might as well glue
a sheet of emery paper to you upper lip for all the chance you've
got of pulling - but beyond that, there’s still something
too: A. try-hard; B. anachronistic; C. ineradicably creepy about
the tache to really translate out of the fashion eddy and into
real life.
On the way home. I pass an army recruitment office and note that
the that man behind the desk inside is wearing a starched-looking
tache, along with the standard-issue air of homicidal stiff-backedness.
I walk brisky on. My advice is you should to the same. In fact,
walk briskly in the direction of Boots' chemist. For the moment,
I’ve decided, Gillette is definitely the best a man can get.
© Kevin Braddock 2001 |
