Mustaches may be enjoying a renaissance

In case you've in a hole the last few years, stylish men have taken to styling their face and body hair — aka "manscaping" — with a zeal not seen since Edward Scissorhands.

The beard, that onetime symbol of rural cluelessness, has become a badge of urban hipsterdom. This has grown to include a spectrum of variations, from a week's slackerly growth to a handsome Czar Nicholas II beard to a full Rutherford B. Hayes thicket.

But its upstairs neighbor, the mustache, has had a bumpier ride. It, like the beard, enjoyed its most widespread popularity between 1850 and 1900; John Wilkes Booth, it must be conceded, had a beaut. But today, the mustache cannot shake its ties to the sexy-yet-buffoonish machismo of the mid-1970s, epitomized by Burt Reynolds, Sam Elliott and the Village People, 'stache sporters all.

Lately, though, there are signs that the mustache is at long last shaking off the most unsavory of those associations. Exhibit A is, of course, Brad Pitt, who grew one just before the filming of Quentin Tarantino's new World War II film, "Inglourious Basterds," and flaunted it for the paparazzi over the holidays.Exhibit B is, of course, the "Milk" Mustache — that is, the one worn by the scene-stealing James Franco, playing Sean Penn's long-suffering and dreamy boyfriend in "Milk." While Penn's performance is the most talked-about aspect of the film, Franco's mustache has elicited plenty of admiration on its own.

Exhibit C is Jason Giambi, the Yankees first baseman whose summer comeback coincided with his sprouting a particularly fine-looking mustache, prompting many to recall the 1972 World Series, when a handlebar-wearing Rollie Fingers and the Oakland A's took on the clean-shaven Cincinnati Reds in "the Hairs vs. the Squares."

Despite these fetching examples, the mustache's fate is uncertain. It still carries plenty of baggage, skewing either too old-school gay (see "Milk") or too old-school straight (see John R. Bolton).

No one knows that fact better than the men who have grown one.

Douglas Friedman, 36, a photographer, has endured many a jab since he grew a "porn-star 'stache," as the basic mustache is widely known, on a whim 10 years ago. "I get a lot of good-natured ribbing, but it's usually derogatory," he says.

Dov Charney, 39, the often controversial chief executive of American Apparel, known for its provocative ads, grew a '70s-style mustache in 2004.

"I had it for seven months — eight months max," Charney says. But over the next three years, whenever media ran stories about him, even after he had a current photo, most ended up using an old, mustached picture.

"People were really attached to that image," he says. "In both positive articles, where they wanted to portray me as this sex-positive playboy, as well as the ones where they wanted to demonize me."

The problem is, the men who look good in a mustache are vastly outnumbered by those using it for comedic effect (See "Anchorman" and "Borat"). Jason Lee does an admirable job straddling the fence as the star of TV's "My Name Is Earl." Though his mustache looks good on him, in a '76 Camaro kind of way, it also reads as an albatross of sorts — a token of his character's lowlife nature for which he is forever making amends. You have to wonder if his mustache will magically fall off on the last episode.

Even the pro-mustache Movember movement is a double-edged razor. Originating in Australia in 2004, Movember challenges men to grow mustaches for November to raise money for men's health charities; an estimated 200,000 men worldwide participated in 2008. It brings the mustache back every fall, only to kill it off a few weeks later.

James Austin, 37, of London, participated with 12 colleagues and then was torn about shaving. "It actually suits a lot of people," Austin said. "There's one guy in particular who doesn't have much of a top lip, so he looks better."

There was little hope that his own would last. "My wife put the kibosh on that," he says.

In 2006, irked that the new popularity of the beard had left the mustache eating dust, Jay Della Valle, 28, persuaded nine 20-something men to grow mustaches and document the experience in a film, "The Glorius Mustache Challenge" ( released on DVD last year.) He now hosts mustache parties and events like Movember and the 'Stache Bash in St. Louis. He kicks these off with an evangelical ceremony, invoking the transfiguring masculine power of the mustache.

"You got to wear it with this attitude," Della Valle says. "Your mustache is always there, saying, 'Yeah, I have a mustache, so bring it on.' If you have a sense of humility connected to your mustache, it doesn't look as good as it should."

But for all its reclaimed machismo, he adds, "The bottom line is: The best response to the question, 'Why the mustache?' is, because it's fun."