Game, set and tache: Carlos Alcaraz joins growing trend for a stylish top lip

The tennis superstar Carlos Alcaraz might have been knocked out of the Shanghai Masters in straight sets earlier this week, but he did so sporting a moustache that became almost as remarked upon as his aptitude for a sneaky drop shot.

“I always wanted to step on the court at least once with the moustache,” Alcaraz said. The Spaniard and his team had all agreed to take the facial-hair plunge if he won the Japan Open, which he did for a second straight year. “¡Bigotes para todos!” or “moustaches for everyone”, they apparently cheered at the end of the match.

At Milan fashion week last month, the Wuthering Heights star Jacob Elordi sported a thin strip of hair on his top lip as he watched his girlfriend, Kendall Jenner, model for the Bottega Veneta show.

A moustachioed Harry Styles is roughly halfway through his record-breaking 30-show residency at Madison Square Garden in New York. The actor Timothée Chalamet, who kept his Marty Supreme ’tache on throughout awards season, has been playing around with his facial hair again, adding a goatee.

On TikTok, gen Z men with moustaches are plentiful, as are tutorials for how to grow and style them – alongside almost as many videos from older generations questioning them.

High street barber shops are seeing evidence of it, too. At Citadel in Sheffield, more young men are asking for moustaches, and a large number are asking specifically for thin ones, which the owner, Marie Williams, describes as “[a] low maintenance, easygoing moustache that’s attainable to most”.

According to Jay Byrne, a barber at Dog House barbers in Birmingham and a formerBritish barber of the year: “The moustache is certainly making a comeback, particularly among younger men.”

The moustaches appearing on young men’s faces are a long way from the bushier ones seen in the 1970s and 80s, epitomised by Tom Selleck in Magnum PI.

They seem more to hark back to the Hollywood stars of the 40s and 50s such as David Niven and Clark Gable. “We’re seeing a move away from the heavier, traditional moustaches … towards a much more refined, deliberately styled look,” says Byrne.

“Achieving the look is all about precision, proportion and understanding what suits the individual’s facial structure. It’s not simply a case of growing a moustache and leaving it alone. The shape, thickness and detailing are what make the difference.”

According to Dr Ashley Morgan, a masculinities scholar at Cardiff Metropolitan University: “Skinny moustaches are a sign of difference, especially from men who keep beards.”

Given the rise of the manosphere and the complicated state of masculinity at the moment, Morgan thinks these skinnier moustaches could be intended to steer clear of signalling alpha masculinity. “Young men want to demonstrate a carefully curated form of ‘manliness’,” she says.

For these young male celebrities in particular, Morgan thinks it could be “an expression of ageing”.

“Timothée Chamalet is 30, Jacob Elordi is 29 … it could well be a sign that they want to show that they are mature, they have entered a new phase of life, and want to be seen as more ‘manly’ while remaining youthful.”

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For 34-year-old Ncuti Gatwa, who starred in the most recent series of Doctor Who, it has certainly been a way to lean into his age after making his name while playing a schoolboy in the hit TV drama Sex Education.

Gatwa told the Radio Times: “I’d spent the last four years playing a child [in Sex Education], at the age of 30, so I said: ‘Let me have my moustache back.’”

The fashion historian Tony Glenville once had a curly moustache but, he says, “like many men, [I] got rid of facial hair during the mask-wearing times of Covid”. He says it is a trend “among young men who’ve not really seen it around so much recently”. Facial hair, as with all things, “has huge fashion phases for men”.

Movember, which launched in 2003 and has grown into a global movement, sees men grow moustaches for the month of November to raise money for charity and has arguably made facial hair more popular again.

For such a small slither of hair, the moustache is historically and culturally freighted. It can symbolise freedom and has long held a central position in gay culture.

While the moustache might be a “trend” in western culture, in other cultures it is much more of a constant. From romance to war, religion to masculinity and sexuality, moustaches connote different things in different contexts.

Luckily for anyone wanting to give a thin moustache a whirl, according to barber Williams, it is a style that “requires minimal upkeep; just a few snips with the scissors to maintain”.

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