On a quiet Monday evening – so quiet I'd dared to actually venture inside a pub for the first time – a few mates and I corralled around a table, sipping pints and talking despairingly about the trials and tribulations of Kanye West. Another friend arrived. He rides a fixie bike, and buys artisanal ceramics, and he'd grown a very spivvy moustache over lockdown.
Oh the times, how they have changed. And not just because I was anti-bac'ing like a mad man each and every time I grazed a 'high touch' surface. They've changed because our moustachioed friend flew under the radar. Nobody said a word. More remarkably, nobody flung an insult – commonplace within our ranks. He was not going to a minimal breakbeat techno festival in the Bulgarian outback. He was not taking up a side hustle as a Magnum P.I. lookalike, either.
For the moustache – once a much maligned piece of facial topiary – isn't quite the dark mark it once was. Slowly (very, very slowly) it's been pulled from the doldrums of the Eighties into the upper echelons of now. Shoulder pads didn't make it out alive. Nor did perms. But that's because they're really horrid. And for what seemed like an eternity, so was the moustache.
My ceramic-loving, vinyl-playing pal isn't alone. In lockdown, the Esquire team failed to get cut, but did choose to cultivate a new 'tache. "Initially, it was just a new bit of furniture, and I forgot about it whenever I wasn't looking at it in a mirror or wiping cold tea off it," says Tom Nicholson, our digital writer. "Now I'm on the other side of that, and I'm pleased with the structure it gives to my face." Nick Pope, our deputy digital editor, concurs: "It started out as a semi-ironic Zoom affectation, but I think, teamed with a some five o'clock shadow, it makes my face look a little more masculine and interesting."
Of course, we exist on the serrated cutting edge of menswear (why are you laughing?). Though now, the moustache is a commercial crop in the mainstream, catapulted into The Culture at large by the king of that very thing (or, at least, its prince regent): Harry Styles. On a wine-drenched trip to Italy, the 'Watermelon Sugar' shotter debuted a moustache that soon did the rounds. If a former boybander turned Top 40 climber is doing it, chances are it's officially OK to do.
Not that such a marker makes the moustache dull. On the contrary, Styles wears pearl earrings and fancy suits and the lacy collars of child-like Edwardian poltergeists. Doing something pleasantly weird is his new normal. Elsewhere in menswear, the sentiment stands: we are all Taking Risks. We are all growing moustaches.
You might look like a cop: a real one, or the one in a special sort of film that makes very unprofessional decisions when dealing with civilians. You might look like an ode to the gay culture of yore, in which handlebar moustaches were grown as a badge of hypermasculinity to out-male the men who claimed that gay men weren't man enough. You might even look like Harry Styles. That's all totally OK. But know this. Know that you won't look like a clown. And your moustache certainly won't face ridicule down at the pub with the more caustic members of your social circle. Because, chances are, everyone else will have one too.
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