Around six months ago, Micah Fitzerman-Blue, a Los Angeles screenwriter, was shaving his beard when he reached the region between his nose and upper lip and thought, “What if I stop here?” “At first, I felt apprehensive because I had never only used a mustache,” he said. But after realizing that his wife didn’t hate it and noticing how common mustaches had become in his Echo Park neighborhood, he embraced the look. “I turned 40 this year and have two young children, so I feel more like a father, but a fun father,” he affirmed.
He’s not alone. The mustache, capable of evoking anything from rugged masculinity to playful irony, to sincere paternal joy, is enjoying one of its periodic rebirths. “Sometimes I ride the metro, look around, and see five people with mustaches within a three-meter radius,” commented Jimmy Brewer, a 27-year-old New York actor who grew a mustache during his vacation a few months ago. He then landed a role in the Broadway musical Shucked and was asked to keep it until the end of his contract. “I’ve always admired them in other people because it seems like those who wear them have more confidence in themselves,” he noted.
While it’s difficult to separate mustache data from overall facial hair trends, industry professionals claim that the increase is significant and recent. The mustache, once the domain of perverts, porn stars, countercultural icons, or unfashionable guys, is becoming a more mainstream facial hair option.
The reasons are varied. The mustache is masculine but playful in a world that enjoys new ways of relating to gender styles. It was on the verge of making a comeback after a decade where everyone had beards, and the quarantine allowed many people to try it out and realize they liked it. “It gained momentum last year, especially since Top Gun came out,” explained Matty Conrad, who owns several barbershops in Vancouver, British Columbia, and a popular YouTube channel dedicated to facial hair care. “I think the mustache is where beards were in 2010. But if it ends up having that staying power, then people who wear it for the novelty factor will start looking elsewhere.”
Nicky Austin, a salon hairstylist and makeup artist responsible for maintaining Ted Lasso’s iconic mustache, attributes the rise of the mustache among her Los Angeles clients to the omnipresence of beard culture, as well as a new openness to personal grooming. “I know men who go to the barber every weekend to maintain their style, which would have been unheard of 20 years ago,” she explained, adding that men experiencing male pattern baldness often find a style change in the mustache.
Attention is also part of the fun. Christian Illuzzi, an artist from Ridgewood, Queens, has been surprised by the attention his mustache receives. He’s had a beard since he was a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology in the 2010s and only recently adopted a full mustache. “I’ve received compliments before, but never as much as for my mustache,” said Illuzzi, echoing the experiences of others. “Guys on the street say, ‘Hey, what an incredible mustache.'”
Mustaches became more common in queer spaces in the late 2010s, especially the thin ones that complemented the manicured sexual aesthetic of that time, leather and Tom of Finland harnesses. And they might have remained on the fringes of mainstream popularity if it weren’t for the pandemic. At that time, men started ditching their beards and exclusively sporting mustaches, influencing other men to follow suit.
“The quarantine definitively freed me from having to deal with that awkward in-between phase, which always prevented me from growing one,” recounted Lucas Johnson, a literature professor from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who grew a wide and thick Chevron-style mustache two years ago. “In my late 20s, it has been a pleasant way to feel fashionable and, at the same time, it’s like I’m advancing into a more mature adulthood.”
He also appreciates its versatility. “The mustache conveys authority but also suggests a dose of silliness,” he affirmed. “It’s very masculine yet also extravagant and discreetly coded as queer. The entire gender spectrum is obsessed with my mustache, just like I am.”
The popularity of the mustache has always been particularly susceptible to cultural icons and current trends. In the early 20th century, mustaches used to be elaborate, like Theodore Roosevelt’s thick walrus style or the waxed tips of the English mustache (think Archduke Franz Ferdinand), ironically revived briefly in the early 1980s by suspender-wearing hipsters in the United States.
Until 1916, British soldiers were forbidden from shaving their upper lip, perhaps due to the deep association of the mustache with virility and strength.
More artificial styles also became an easy target for mockery. Charlie Chaplin’s toothbrush mustache, that little patch above the lip, was specifically adopted for its comedic appeal before becoming associated with Hitler and forever losing its place in the fashion cycle.
After the 1950s, the mustache became the preferred countercultural facial hair for a range of groups considered subversive: long-haired hippies, Marxists, homosexuals. Freddie Mercury had one of the most iconic mustaches of the century.
As the stylistic division between mainstream and counterculture blurred in the 1970s and 1980s, the mustache became associated with male swagger and appeared on the faces of Burt Reynolds, Tom Selleck, Sam Elliott, and others. Not everyone could pull it off, which was always part of its appeal, but these hypermasculine associations lent themselves to exaggeration, and the mustache was playfully adopted in queer culture. It also spread through the porn industry, giving it a hint of debauchery.
Of course, in many places, such as the Middle East and Mexico, the mustache absorbed its own set of rich associations that often made their way to the United States, giving the style different meanings for different groups. For African Americans, its evocation of authority and steadfastness made the mustache popular among civil rights leaders like Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr., before losing popularity in the 1970s (as detailed by Wesley Morris in a 2020 essay in The New York Times, it remains a vivid way to relate to black identity).
By the late 1990s, the mustache had gone so out of fashion that few thought it would come back. But as a critical mass of mustache wearers has gathered, the style has gradually shed the subcultural associations it garnered in the 1980s, leading more people to imagine it on their own faces.
Currently, there are two especially popular options: the chevron, compass-shaped (like the one Ron Swanson sports in Parks and Recreation) and the prominent mustache combined with a stubble beard, known as the beardstache (examples include Henry Cavill, The Weeknd, or any Brooklyn Ph.D. student). The more meticulous options, like the pencil mustache, the styled mustache with a part, or the handlebar mustache, remain for the most skilled.
But any style choice that significantly changes one’s face is going to feel a bit comical, a bit ironic and playful. And in a world rethinking the meaning of masculinity, those associations can also be welcomed.
“I think a lot of people are grappling with questions about how to embody their masculine side in a way that feels good and doesn’t feel like an act,” said Johnson, the literature professor in Brooklyn. A mustache, he said, “feels like a fun way to enjoy masculinity…”.
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