Weirdos, beardos

As far as coming-of-age rituals go, having your first-ever barbershop shave is probably not as bloggable as surviving your first backpacking trip across Europe, but somehow it can lead to as much introspection. Though I had long bid adios to the peach fuzz of my pubescence, going in for a professional shave — hot towel, shaving cream, minimal bloodletting — was as cherry-popping as ever. 

I swaggered in with my eight-day scruff. It was an achievement in hair-growing so epic that I imagined myself to be goat-voiced alt-folk singer Devendra Banhart. My local Sweeney Todd, however, thought otherwise. He deemed my insane face shrubbery insufficient, arguing that 20 — okay, 12 — follicles do not warrant such a ceremony. Still I persisted, and after 45 minutes, I felt manlier, even if the barber had reminded me quite gently to cultivate my moustache for a longer period of time before another session with the razor. Like three months.

Haute Hobos

So it was with awe and mild befuddlement that I read Cathy Horyn’s review of the first clutch of men’s spring 2011 collections in Paris. “The facial hair question popped up at the shows of Jean-Paul Gaultier and Yohji Yamamoto,” wrote the New York Times fashion critic. “Both cast a number of men with untrimmed beards, and Mr. Yamamoto added ponytails and tight rolls of sausage curls just below the temples.”

With this flood of haute hobos, these designers were telegraphing a message: perhaps it was time to balance the smooth-faced Dandyism and overwhelming preppiness that have dominated men’s fashion over the last few seasons with something more unkempt and less wimpy. The eclectic casting choices at these Paris presentations were a striking counterpoint to those in Milan, where too-groomed archetypes still ruled the runway at Alexander McQueen, under new house designer Sarah Burton and Prada.   

Hirsute Pursuits

In October 2008, Joaquin Phoenix illustrated just how an actor can make headlines with his sudden shagginess. Ninja-like, the Oscar winner announced that he was retiring from acting to concentrate on his hip-hop career. It was a move many suspected was an elaborate hoax from a documentary filmed by his brother-in-law Casey Affleck. At any rate, it generated guffaws and used up some bandwidth.

Earlier that year, after his show was put on hold during the writers’ strike that crippled Hollywood, Conan O’Brien emerged unshaven and extra sarcastic. His strike beard expressed his unequivocal solidarity with his absent crew. That exercise in non-grooming foreshadowed his unemployment beard, which he has been sporting since leaving The Tonight Show following a very public — and very ugly — spat with Jay Leno and NBC in January 2010.

Beardy Boys With Thick Glassses

Of course, you can count on cranky bloggers to say that the facial-tuft-as-trend thing has been going on for years; they will cite Brooklyn, Portland, San Francisco’s Mission District and LA’s Los Feliz and Silver Lake neighborhoods as breeding grounds for beardy boys with thick framed glasses and second-hand clothes. While it may be true that it’s not a completely new thing — there was John Lennon circa 1969 and, to a certain extent, men in Victorian England — the growing ranks of dudes with scraggly face-warmers do articulate something about where masculinity is right now.

First, these hirsute pursuits could very well be an unruly protest against the uniformity of our flat, Internet age. Monumental lumberjack chest beards and upper-lip caterpillars evoke a less superficial time, when people barely paid attention to how many followers hyped their outfit on Lookbook.

Next, untamed mountain-man facial hair suggests some kind of feral intensity. Popular culture of late has been about underdogs and outcasts and maybe this push towards hypermasculinity is a reaction to that. For every fey pop star like Adam Lambert, there has to be a rugged Followill brother from Kings of Leon to even things out. 

Retrosexual

Last and most important, I think that the rise of this hippie-friendly aesthetic is a possible backlash to all the primping that David Beckham and his tweezed and tanned cohorts stood for in the early Aughts. Secondhand ironies aside, beards could be the ultimate knell to a dead word and an even deader concept: metrosexuality. So can we call it “retrosexuality”?

In April 2005, the New York Times explained that beards were hip because they were subversive. Nothing says idle like out-of-control facial hair, and in a culture that prizes notions like work ethic and professionalism, that’s a major statement. I believe that rebel appeal hasn’t been lost to the mainstream just yet. Since my East Asian genes have made it impossible for me to sprout a beard, this is something I plan to mull over while caressing my invisible handlebar moustache. 

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