Move over porn ’tache and goodbye the hipster beard — the goatee is the coolest facial fuzz in town. And that’s official. Once the choice of regional bouncers and card magicians called Alan, the goatee is having an unexpected — and rather fashionable — return. Just ask Balenciaga. “When a catwalk show as big as that sends out four — four — male models all with goatee beards, you know something is about to happen,” says Paul Toner, deputy editor at 10 Men magazine.
But goatees? Aren’t they a bit . . . Robot Wars? “How do you think fashion trends happen?” Toner says, laughing. “Anything remotely Y2K, especially if once considered slightly naff, is having a moment again.”
“In a way it had to happen,” the men’s fashion stylist Gareth Scourfield believes. “If urban lumberjack beards have made way for the moustache, then surely this is next.”
And the data backs it up. At the point of writing, “Shaving a perfect goatee” has had a whopping four million views on YouTube.
Back at the recent fashion weeks — normally a portent of the next big thing in designer dresses — it was the male celebrity front-row guests who were modelling a different trend. Long a keen facial topiarist, Iron Man Robert Downey Jr lent a dashing, D’Artagnan-style air to the Stella McCartney show with his barely there goatee. And there might have been a new designer at Gucci, but really all eyes were on Ryan Gosling, who walked in with his new “disconnected” goatee — natty, angled and, we imagine, a bugger to snog. It was as if the clean-shaven Ken had never existed.
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It’s in the Premier League, though, where goatees have really hit the back of the net. It’s hard not to spot some kind of goatee on @footballerfits. The Instagram account (543,000 followers and counting) and TikTok feed devoted to the beautiful game’s best-dressed players are a hugely popular watch for young men who dissect, discuss and then recreate the look of their favourite ballers — and their beards. It also goes part of the way to explaining the goatee’s popularity among the older lads at school (see also: the pencil moustache, or as school bants would have it, “the thirsty eyebrow”. Translation: an eyebrow that’s popped down for a drink. Thank you, A$AP Rocky, for that particular trend).
And then there’s Top Boy’s Ashley Walters: his finely honed goatee is as sharp as his acting. And finally, proving the apple never falls far from the tree, the brothers Romeo, Cruz and Brooklyn then debuted a triumvirate of the same stubbly-look goatees at the premiere of the Netflix documentary Beckham, in an on-the-money tribute to his dad David’s goatee look from way back when.
Not sure if a goatee is for you? On social media, in a kind of “try without buying”, comedy filters on TikTok give everyone the chance to model a beard (mums included). Who has not screen-grabbed a picture of themselves sporting a “Paul Hollywood” bang in the middle of Bake Off ?
The old-school, “connected” goatee —where ’tache meets chin — has long been a go-to for Hollywood actors of a certain status (and age). “Those who grow goatees together stay together” is the fraternal mantra of the Pitt-DiCaprio bromance. And while Idris Elba’s goes handsome and old-school, Succession’s shouty-crackers Brian Cox is the daddy goat of them all, it’s white — like the snow. Ask any man over the age of 50: a beard can hide a multitude of sins — and chins.
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“A goatee — buzzed with a fade — is a gent’s secret weapon,” says the men’s groomer Teddy Mitchell. “Done properly, and with practice, it can give vital oomph to a weak jawline and volume to a receding chin. It’s also far cheaper than fillers.”
