Facial hair. Some people say it looks great on men. Others, not so much. A new exhibit at The History Museum takes a look at changing mustache, beard and sideburn styles over time.
The History Museum’s latest exhibit stems from a curator thumbing through old photos in early 1900s scrapbooks of the Olivers, one of South Bend’s founding industrialist families.
"With fantastic mustaches and sideburns, and she thought, 'Wow! These are great pictures! What's the story behind these?'" said museum Registrar Cat Page-Vanore.
She says the curators were so inspired by the photos that they created an exhibit, “Fantastic Facial Hair.”
On Wednesday at 1:30 p.m., Page-Vanore will give a talk on the exhibit in the museum’s Wiekamp Auditorium. It’s part of the museum’s monthly Insights in History series.
The facial hair styles exhibited range from the more common, like the goatee, with hair on the chin only, and the handlebar mustache, more recently brought back into vogue by hipsters, to the not-so-common chin puff and musketeer. There’s also something on the toothbrush mustache, the one that Hitler ruined.
Now when she looks at pictures of J.D. Oliver, Page-Vanore says she’s struck by the time and care that men must have invested in their facial hair.
"To wax it into shape and comb it, and make sure it was clean and expertly coiffed, must have been a great amount of time to portray a very specific masculine image with that mustache."
A collection of 3D artifacts includes coffee mugs with mustache dams attached to the rim.
"It was designed to press up against a gentleman's mustache and keep it from getting logged up with coffee or cream or whatever. Keep the mustache nice and clean. A nicely sculpted mustache takes a lot of wax or other oils to make it sit just right, so you don't want to get coffee in your mustache if you're in the 1900s."
