The once-bearded New York mayor has downsized his facial hair. Does it work?
By Dave Schilling
I’ve battled with facial hair almost my entire adult life.
I started growing it early, turning me into a pubescent villain from a spaghetti western. I was told by my parents not to shave it off, lest it grow back more furious than before. I just had to walk around high school looking like a hungover bond trader, which did nothing for my popularity.
Once I hit proper adulthood, I grew a real beard, one that could effectively hide my chubby infant face. Now, I shave regularly, so that passersby don’t get a gander at my prodigious gray hair. Yes, my temples are whiter than the Lakers’ starting lineup, but a full-on Santa beard just exacerbates the problem. I am old, and getting older.
I could follow the lead of the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and grow a mustache instead. Mamdani rose to political prominence with a thick, black beard. The mustache is like Teddy Roosevelt shaving his own mustache off and settling for a soul patch.
The beard made Mamdani’s already sunny face even more “cool dad” adjacent. It made him look both more rugged and somehow more approachable, like the most affable econ professor the East Village had ever known. But that nice guy beard is gone, replaced with a 70s-style mustache. I’ll be monitoring the situation for increased thickness, volume, and contour variation.
Whenever a public figure changes their look, it’s a shock. A famous actor goes blonde and it’s headline news for the gossip industrial complex. A new piercing or a bit of plastic surgery can launch a thousand memes. But a mustache is another thing entirely. A mustache evokes a very particular reaction, considering its association with retired baseball players, sleazy used car dealers, and 20th-century union-busting oil barons. On a politician, it’s a bit undignified.
Look, I’m no class traitor. I’m not fully anti-mustache. I believe in the working person’s right to a Tom Selleck special on their upper lip.
My father, an air force master sergeant, had a mustache for most of the 1990s. When he left home to go fight in the Gulf war, he had the ‘stache. He came back with it, plus a Tabasco bottle filled with Kuwaiti sand. Mustaches are in my blood. They’re my birthright, but I can’t even begin to dream about a world where I have one.
It runs counter to everything I believe myself to be – a man who can’t even figure out how to properly put air in my tires. I’ve tried to use a hammer on the wrong end more than once. I haven’t cleaned a single gutter in my entire life. For me, a mustache would be the lowest form of stolen valor. The only way I could be more disingenuous would be if I started dressing like Bruce Springsteen on the Born to Run cover.
I grant Zohran his mustache, even if I see him on MS Now and think for a second that it’s Bob Hoskins in a toupee. Zohran’s mustache isn’t even the facial hair of the year – that title goes to Oliver Reed in the recently re-released 1971 film The Devils. But it has grown on me (pun intended), and I accept his decision to alter his personal brand ever so slightly.
With that said, we must be steadfast in who we, as a culture, allow to wear a mustache.
John Waters is grandfathered in, as the filth-monger director without his wispy facial hair would be as sacreligious as all of his movies. Timothée Chalamet grew a mustache for Marty Supreme, but if he wore that thing permanently, I’d have to send him a strongly worded letter. Barack Obama with a mustache would conjure images of the bartender from The Love Boat. We must hold the line.
The mustache will always have blue-collar connotations. There are always outliers, but the vibe is the vibe. The mustache is powerful, it’s direct, and it is unequivocal.
As a tool of personal identity, it might be unmatched. If you have one, you are guaranteed to be “the mustache guy” in your circle of friends. Some people might even keep your number in their phone as “Mr Mustache”.
So, unless you can confidently go on Morning Joe and be called “Magnum PI”, then don’t do it. Don’t let GQ or some other style magazine pressure you into following the inevitable Mamdani-led trend. You are not him. You are not Jacob Elordi. Don’t make the decision lightly. Study, ponder, consult. Sure, you can shave off a mustache in a few minutes, but you can’t undo the damage to your social life if your facial hair flops.
You must accept this. You have to embrace it, otherwise the mustache will consume you. This is why I will never wear one. Mustaches wear you.
Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist
