Maybe it's because I had just turned 30 and needed some kind of change. Maybe it's because I was reading a stack of books by and about Friedrich Nietzsche, all of them with the same cover image: a black-and-white photograph of the thinker who brought us the will to power, with a mustache on his kisser the likes of which only German philosophy and the 19th century could ever produce.
Whatever the reasons, I grew a 'stache myself. I didn't do it to be ironic. I didn't do it to be funny, although my girlfriend repeatedly laughed at me. And I certainly didn't do it to become - well, how to put this? - not a jerk per se, but the kind of person who moved through space with a brassy, my-way-or-the-highway swagger. But that's what I became. I highly recommend it.
"A mustache enables one to stare down a walnut at 50 paces and make it explode," says Aaron Perlut, executive director of the American Mustache Institute, a St. Louis-based mustache advocacy group that played host last month to 'Stache Bash, a celebration of that most man-tastic style statement. "There is a sense of confidence that goes along with wearing a mustache."
This month, of course, is "Movember," a month-long initiative (http://www.movember.com) encouraging men in Canada, the United States, Australia and numerous other countries to grow mustaches for charity. But until recently, the 'stache had fallen on hard times after its heyday in the 1970s. Since then, the ol' soup strainer had most often been associated with perverts or weirdos (see Ned Flanders), porn stars (see Ron Jeremy), Magnum P.I. (see Magnum P.I.) and dictators (see all of them).
Earlier this year, however, Esquire magazine declared that "the serious mustache is back." And if you study pop culture, you'll see lip sweaters everywhere, from the dirt-stache worn by Jason Lee in My Name is Earl to the manly 'stache Josh Brolin walked tall with in No Country for Old Men to the intimidatingly impressive one that helped win Daniel Day Lewis an Oscar for his performance in There Will Be Blood. A movie version of Magnum P.I. is even in the works, although it is not known if Matthew McConaughey, who is rumoured to be starring in the film, will wear a mustache for his portrayal of the private investigator Tom Selleck made famous. It's a lot of mustache to live up to, after all.
In fact, no other facial hair is as semiotically rich as the 'stache. If you happen to doubt the mustache's ability to project certain codes and values, show up to work with a Hitlerian version, also known as a toothbrush mustache. As you're being chased out of town by an angry mob, use the time to reconsider the mustache's powerful symbolism.
"Anything we use on our bodies is a statement about us," says Marcel Danesi, a professor of semiotics at the University of Toronto. "Today, the mustache carries over some of the previous meanings that it's had. One of them is masculinity. Hair on the face means male. So maybe there's that subtext there." Another subtext, he says, is that of intellectualism. "There is a long tradition of famous people from Debussy on wearing mustaches that said, 'I'm a musician, I'm an artist.' "
Given that the mustache can signify membership in a group, it's no surprise that 'staches are so popular among cops, firefighters and bikers. It's probably also significant that these groups are made up of men who - and I'm sorry but there's no polite way of saying this - don't take other people's crap.
The range of mustache styles and their expressiveness, combined with the fact that they don't require the same sort of commitment as other hipster trends, may in part explain their popularity, Purlet says.
