Many participants reported receiving harsh reactions - particularly from women - once hair sprouted above their lips. One participant, Terry, described the challenge as “taking a new step into looking completely absurd.” 21 at the Kraine Theater, on East Fourth Street in Manhattan, captures the public’s ambivalence toward the style, with a slew of randomly chosen men and women passing judgment. Della Valle’s film, which has been screened selectively since its release in 2005 and will be shown again on Nov. “I thought it would be fun to grow mustaches because most guys didn’t have them.” Della Valle, 26, who sports a curly handlebar (if not a respect for the traditional spelling of “glorious”). “It was just a funny and quirky idea that people reacted to,” said Mr. To decode the mystery of the mustache, a filmmaker named Jay Della Valle has made “The Glorius Mustache Challenge,” for which 50 men younger than 30 were asked to “rock the ’stache” - to grow whatever they could on their upper lip - for a month as a kind of fashion dare. But the style never quite reached the kind of critical mass needed for it to tip from underground cool to mainstream fashion, like the goatee.
“It’s an unspoken deal.”Ī few years ago, youngish cultural provocateurs like the fashion photographer Terry Richardson, Dov Charney, the owner of American Apparel clothing, and Morgan Spurlock, the filmmaker of “Super Size Me,” began sporting mustaches in a statement of retro hip. “If you’re a fireman, you have a mustache,” said Ron Walker, 47, a fire captain in Dixon, Calif. It has long enjoyed an un-ironic popularity among blue-collar men. Similarly, Jason Lee’s mustachioed character in the NBC comedy “My Name Is Earl” is meant to be a buffoon.īut the mustache is also associated with masculinity and power. In “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen wears a mustache in the title role of the dimwitted, obnoxious foreign journalist. One thing is for sure: No other style of male grooming sends so many potent - and often mixed - signals. ARE mustaches cool? Uncool? Or so painfully uncool they are actually kind of hip? It’s possible they are all three at once, depending on who is wearing one and who is taking notice.