Reflecting on Our Mustache Moment
The epitome of our pervasive mustache culture is captured in the photography of Greg Anderson, who traveled to New Orleans to photograph the 2013 Beard and Mustache Championships.
Walk around San Francisco and other American cities these days and you’ll no doubt spot them: regular-looking cars with regular-looking people, and a bright pink mustache on the grill. The mustache is a move by car-sharing company Lyft to build a brand and a community around their service, but it’s only effective in the context of a world of mustaches.
Claire’s, the teen accessories store found in just about every mall in the United States, carries a wide variety of mustache-themed accessories, from a necklace to a pair of mustache bacon knee-highs. Movember, coming up next month, celebrates the mustache’s ability to cure prostate and testicular cancer (okay, not directly — but through raising awareness). A peek into Tumblr yields a thriving subculture of memes and mustaches, a celebration of the fur above the upper lip.
The epitome of all this, surely, is captured in the photography of Greg Anderson, which has been making the rounds on the internet recently. Anderson, who’s based in Las Vegas, traveled to New Orleans to photograph the 2013 Beard and Mustache Championships after missing the 2012 version in his hometown. “There were a few eccentric types,” he noted in an email with Hyperallergic — although he copied and pasted responses from another interview he had done — “but largely these are regular, down to earth guys who enjoy being a part of the bearding community and gathering once a year to see their friends and have a good time. It seems to be more about the comraderie than the competition.”
The photos are superb, and they bring to life the nation’s very best mustaches and beards. These are the real deal, the fuzzy Platonic ideal that Lyft, Claire’s, and Movember can only aspire to.
