FASHION Magazine

  • Men on trend: The evolution of the bearded hunk, from Burt Reynolds to Ryan Gosling

    Beard

    He has clearly just rolled out of his log cabin to forage for berries and slap a tin coffee pot over a fire of loose twigs. His long hair and beard are wild, and he is dressed in things thermal and plaid, with barely laced, modified Kodiaks on his feet.

    A maniac living off the grid? Hardly. This was the subject of a recent lush fashion spread in the Financial Times: a manly man “whose hardwearing frontier style is wildly on trend.” Total cost of the new Daniel Boone’s morning attire: $7,925, which includes his Gold Cybele necklace and Wright & Teague rings. Once, this beast-man would have been mistaken for a 1970s pot dealer, a sasquatch or our sexual antithesis. (I have heard so many women long for the smooth, hairless type that for years I assumed all women were looking for male/female hybrids.)

    But now—as with another ’70s icon, Burt Reynolds lying bare-ass on a bearskin rug—the woodsman is a bona fide hunk, a highly masculine, testosterone-flaring, sexy wild thing who makes us look and feel so tiny and, well, pruned beside him.