Stylish ‘staches: Archive exhibit displays historical facial hair

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Photo courtesy the Hub
By Pete Jones

Handlebar, pencil-thin, closed loop, facespanner, waterfall, or Fu Manchu.
However it’s grown, a mustache can make a statement. Tom Selleck’s mustache is infamous, and the odds are, most students’ fathers grew them in the 70s. Still, no era was better for mustaches than the 19th century, or at least that is what the blog, “Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century,” aims to prove.
Created by UK photo archivist Jason Flahardy, the blog features pictures of Chester A. Arthur, Friedrich Nietzsche and other men of the 19th century whose top lip is covered by a well-sculpted mustache. The site, mustachesofthenineteenthcentury.blogspot.com, started as an office joke after Flahardy and coworkers noticed the facial hair fad in photos they were archiving.

“We had joked about it for years,” Flahardy said. “We would find particularly nice mustaches and photocopy them. It was a running joke that we had that everybody in the 19th century had a mustache.”
Last year, Flahardy and fellow archivist Deirdre Scaggs were asked to create displays for The Hub in the W. T. Young Library during October, which is Archives Month.
“I jokingly suggested that we do mustaches of the 19th century,” Flahardy said.
To his surprise, the idea was approved. However, when Flahardy realized the amount of mustaches he had collected, he decided to create a blog in addition to the displays. He posted his first mustache in July 2007, and “Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century” grew from there.
Since its creation, the mustache blog has had 256,000 hits, according to Flahardy’s stat counter. Almost 600 blogs have referenced or linked to it. Even now, the blog averages about 300 hits per day, and regular followers post comments. The photo displays in The Hub will remain up through October.
More than just pictures of men sporting mustaches, the blog educates on the history of mustaches and terminology. One fact on the site is that British military men were required to have a mustache until 1916 when Parliament revoked the order.
All original material posted on the blog comes from UK’s archives and the photographs are donations, mostly from private families and state bequeaths, Flahardy said.
“We pretty much have the largest collection of Kentucky Civil War photographs,” he said. “Most of what we do is serve photographs to the public that are specifically about the history of Lexington and Kentucky.”
Unfortunately, Flahardy said the blog has slowed a bit because he is running out of mustaches. He said the 20th century had some great mustaches. He named President Taft, Lemmy from the band Motorhead and Vincent Price as the top three 20th century mustaches.
“We’ll have to start a project to go hunt down more mustaches,” he said.