You know how boys are after a few beers at a summer cookout.
They get silly.
You know how boys are after a few beers at a summer cookout. They get silly.
So the surprising thing is not that Bryan Duggan, 22, shaved off the beard he’d had since the beginning of college or even that he left a mustache. It’s that he still has that ‘stache more than two months after the party. The three other guys who did the same thing managed to live with the mustaches for only a single night.
“At first it was kind of funny and a joke, but now I like it,” Duggan said, who is studying business at N.C. State and has to be one of the few guys on campus who bears a passing resemblance to Burt Reynolds.
Mustache fashion has had its cyclical turns, ebbing and flowing with the decade. Reynolds personified the mustache’s ride in the ’70s, and Tom Selleck took up its cause in the ’80s. The ’90s were left without a mustache icon.
But the ‘stache is back amongst urban hipsters, at least a little bit, and we’ll count Duggan in that category. After all, the guy works at a coffee bar.
But what about the men who have had hairy lips for decades, no matter the style? Why have they stuck with it?
For that we spoke with guys like Mike Orbach, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University. Orbach, 59, works at the Duke Marine Laboratory in Beaufort and has had a mustache since – are you ready? – 1967.
He grew it for his college girlfriend, the woman who would become his wife.
“I think she thought I looked too young or too naive or something and the mustache would change that,” he said.
The story is backed up by Judi, whom he married in 1969.
“I think he looked a little wholesome,” she said, remembering the long-haired hippie days of late ’60s California, where they met and attended college.
That’s not to say that Orbach dropped out. As a member of the National Guard in the ’70s, he kept the mustache, even as his company commanders gave him guff about its length. Orbach took to waxing and turning up the ends, so the mustache would meet military guidelines, regulations he remembers by heart to this day.
“The regulation says only that any portion of the mustache that extends beyond the corner of the mouth cannot drop below a line parallel with the lower lip,” he said with a smile.
Other than a few years where he grew a full beard, the mustache has stood on its own.
“Fashion hasn’t really bothered me a bit,” said Orbach, whose bushy, handlebar mustache rounds out a style heavy on Hawaiian shirts and Panama hats. “I like the look. I like the feel. It’s part of me.”
Kevin Todd, who teaches high school and coaches boys and girls soccer, has had his thin mustache off and on for 20 years. It’s so thin that it requires daily maintenance, and sometimes a touch-up before going out for the evening.
Again, fashion doesn’t have much to do with it.
“I look at myself in the mirror every day and I know what I’m comfortable with,” said Todd, who declined to give his age. He has no plans to shave anytime soon.
“I don’t know when I’ll cycle out of having a mustache now because it’s sort of ingrained in my thinking that this is necessary to go out and face the world each day,” he said with a laugh.
As for the latest styles, Micah Johnson, associate fashion editor at Details magazine, says that in New York the mustache is predominantly worn by a certain brand of hipster. He describes this guy as a bit Victorian, perhaps with long hair. This guy may have had a full beard a few years ago, but has since switched to the ‘stache.
The difference between this dude and Selleck is that this kind of hipster grows a mustache for the sense of irony. Enough time hasn’t passed for the mustache to return to the style mainstream, Johnson said. “When the ’70s really come back, we’ll be ready for it.”
So is it possible, in 2007, for a young man to pull of a non-ironic mustache?
“No,” Johnson said.
Duggan understands the sentiment. People have assumed that he grew the mustache as a joke, that his facial hair is nothing but an amusing side note. But he has come to embrace it. His sisters like it, because it reminds them of their father, who passed away a few years ago. And he does, too.
“I think I’m going to stick with it for a while.”
