My hair-raising investigation into a Gen Z cult

Times

4 days ago

The idea is absurd. It is my wife's. 'I keep seeing these really young men with moustaches,' she says, planting the seeds of it, one evening.
Soon I am seeing them too, downtown and in scruffy Brooklyn. It's a peculiar sight. When I was growing up, moustaches were strictly for tradesmen and grandfathers. Now here they are on the faces of people who barely remember 9/11. Harry Styles starts wearing one. And there are these young dudes who call themselves the East Villains.
'It's a play on East Village residents,' an East Villain aficionado tells me. She is 21, a college student; we're in the garden of a bar in Brooklyn. 'In California, it's Silverlake Men. You have the Silverlake Men and the East Villains. It's a big thing on social media.
'They are these guys that smoke Marlboro Reds, they have hiking carabiners looped in their 501 jean pockets. They have a backwards cap or a frontwards cap, a little bit of a mullet. And these people … will always have a moustache. Always. Bar none.'
Does Donald Trump have something to do with this? I ask because whenever something happens now, you have to assume he might be involved.
'I think it goes along with this archetyping, or codification of the idea of James Dean,' the student replies. 'This is my theory: old Hollywood stars, they didn't always have moustaches but the aspirational man, trying to emulate this old Hollywood man, he has to have a moustache … You go for a moustache just to have the facsimile of what is masculine.'
Hey, I say to an editor. We should get some old codger in the office to grow a moustache and see if people start treating him as a member of Gen Z. Some guy who is a bit past his prime.
'Good idea,' she says.
I stop shaving my upper lip. For about ten days you cannot really tell, except with powerful lighting.
'It's really good,' says one of my son's friends, who has something similar. He is 11.
Then I start to glimpse it: a horizon of fur beneath the eye. It gives you the fleeting impression that you are furry all over. This must be what it is like to be a bear.
I fear people will treat me differently. Interviewing the actor Kelsey Grammer, I feel obliged to explain that the nostril hedge is just part of an investigation.
'It's a little thin,' he says. 'How many days?'
Two weeks.
He did not like to mention it, he says. 'I always assume that young men are growing whatever part of their facial hair because that's what they can grow.'
By week four, the moustache is in full bloom.
'You've got a mo!' cries an Australian colleague in the office. 'You gotta go and find your mo bros.'
I go in search of mo bros on a humid Monday night with James Gallagher, a film-maker and photographer. Alighting in Williamsburg, there are moustaches everywhere. I see five just walking off the subway platform.
There's another on the face of a Harvard student named Elio Torres, celebrating his 21st birthday in a beer garden. 'I'm second-generation Latino,' he says. 'It's a little hard to demonstrate that in terms of your physical attitude.'
Hence his moustache. It's new. 'I was really thrown off by it,' says his friend Simone Marteo, 21. 'I was like, 'Woah! Are you Orlando?' Which is his dad's name.'
In a bar called Alligator Lounge, a tech developer named Brendan Justice, 29, pulls out his phone. 'I'm in a group of men called the Moustache DAO,' he says. It's a Whatsapp group. 'All these men are in crypto,' he says. 'DAO stands for decentralised autonomous organisation. We are all dedicated to advancing moustache-kind.'
Brendan's moustache is blond and he has a mullet that spills from his backwards cap — for apparently, these are back in fashion too. A large screen behind him is playing something called Nostalgia TV, with lots of moustaches. There's Hulk Hogan and his bleached walrus bristles; there is Chris Pratt, lavishly whiskered.
Members of Moustache DAO post pictures of themselves to the group chat and an AI bot scans them for an evaluation. 'It will give you proof of moustache,' he says.
There is a leaderboard charting how often people have given proof. 'The top person has sent their moustache 51 times,' he says. 'I'm at 13.' He looks at mine. 'You should join,' he says.
I explain that it is just part of an investigation. Or possibly, a midlife crisis. I cannot quite imagine that anyone would find it attractive. It feels like the defensive pikes of an infantry battalion, repelling all advances. My wife refers to it as 'the chaperone'.
But then James, the photographer, tells a story about his girlfriend. She so loves moustaches that he grew one for Valentine's Day. 'Every time I walked into a room, she lit up,' he says.
We are by now in a bar called Union Pool, with several luminaries of the moustache movement. One of them is ND Austin, a leader in New York's 'underground drinking' scene who creates pop-up speakeasies. As long as I have known him, he has always had a delicate black moustache that rises at the corners like a smile.
'My experience,' he says, 'since I grew a moustache, is that the people who haven't wanted to kiss me because of the moustache was … far, far outweighed by people who are like: 'Ooohhh.''
I think mine makes me look like a deviant. The other day, delivering a box of coffee to my children's primary school, I caught sight of my moustache in the video screen at the front door. I did not think they should let me in.
'You have a sex-pest moustache!' Austin exclaims. 'One hundred per cent!'
'You do,' concurs his friend Jason Eppink, 41, a bearded artist.
Austin says a friend of his had a moustache so fierce that when he went into bars, 'dudes that felt threatened would get into fights with him. He's a total pacifist but he just looked like someone who was about to shiv you', he says. 'His girlfriend made him shave the moustache off. The moment he did that, no problems.'
Another of his friends 'has a moustache that makes him look extra sleazy and he works it,' he says. 'He is an international lothario.'
This friend arrives. His name is Brendan Burke, 44. 'I think Covid launched a lot of moustaches,' he says. 'You could come out, afterwards, and pretend you always looked this way.'
He shows me some photos of earlier models: a handlebar, and then a pencil moustache. The current number, shades of Clark Cable, has a peculiar effect on certain people, he says.
'I go talk to cops, they think I'm on the force,' Brendan says. 'If I put on a suit I can walk into a movie theatre without buying a ticket.'
Other men with moustaches nod to him. 'I met someone at a rave in Detroit the other day,' he says. 'We were in the tech booth talking about how well situated each other's moustaches were, to our faces, and what was our whole journey with that.'
'Your journey!' Eppink exclaims.
'Fulfillment!' Austin says. 'You have finally come into your own.'
But 'now every freaking person has a moustache', Burke says. 'I used to be different! Now I'm just every other hipster again.'
They fall to talking about moustache care. Austin suggests that I mascara my moustache, to give it some oomph. But I think I will get shot of it. If it makes me look any younger, this can only be because it distracts from the other cracks in the painting. It is like wearing a monocle.
I take it with me on one last outing, to a book launch in Chelsea. The actress Gina Gershon is there. She was in Cocktail and Showgirls. She has big dark hair and a mischievous half slant to her smile.
What do you think of my moustache? I ask.
'If I were a guy, I would have a full beard and moustache and mutton chops,' she says. 'So maybe I'm the wrong person to ask.'
I'm just growing it as part of an investigation, I say. 'I think it looks great,' she says. 'I think they make you look … like you are hiding something naughty.' She gives me one of her wicked smiles. And all of a sudden, I start thinking about keeping it.