Back in the 1980s, Don Johnson’s unshaven look became a hot thing for some people, but when I first entered the professional workforce, if you weren’t keeping a beard, it was still the assumption that you would shave every day.
I’m talking early 1990s, Midwestern and Northeastern United States, white-collar, degree-holding professionals.
If you came in unshaven, people would look at you askance, likely comment on it. You certainly wouldn’t be allowed to meet clients or other outside contacts looking like that.
Sometime between, say 1991 and 2016, that seems to have completely dropped away as a basic assumption, in the professional world—except, perhaps, if you are a performer or otherwise have a job that requires you to appear on television.
Even at the fanciest law firms I have noticed that they are okay with profile photographs of unshaven men.
Now, I think this is a great thing. I’m always in favor of erosion of grooming and dress codes imposed by employers or other sources of social pressure. Now if we can only get politicians and news anchors to give up daily shaving and those goddamn ties and suit jackets.
I’m wondering if other people have noticed this trend.
Just to name one profession, maybe you can find some doctors who are unshaven (I assume you don’t mean with a beard but just with five-o’clock-shadow) but I have never seen one.
I had maintained a full beard at about 1" for a while, but I stopped trimming altogether about 12 months ago. My beard grows extremely fast. Not that I believe it actually grows faster than other mens’, but I’m Chinese so it comes out straight. I gain in length the full 1/4" per month.
I work for a defense contractor and my office is in a restricted area. Nobody really cares. If it weren’t for my ID badge everyone would probably assume a homeless guy wandered into the office somehow. However, it does make me extraordinarily recognizable; there are very few people on base who don’t know who I am.
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I have a distinct memory from 1996, my first job out of college. A guy came into the office on a Friday unshaven. His coworker razzed him, “It’s casual Friday, but you still have to shave”. This was a guy with a customer facing role, and being clean shaven was expected.
BTW, remember “casual Friday”? In most jobs, every day is causal day now.
I kind of miss a little more formality in the office. I miss ties and button down shirts.
Anyway, I’ve also noticed in my lifetime the unshaven look becoming much more acceptable, even among doctors. I hate shaving, but I keep a short beard. I still shave my neck and keep my beard trimmed reasonably well.
I’m a psychiatrist and I shave on alternate days. I used to shave daily, but I got tired of shaving so much, wanted to trim down my morning routine, and decided one day’s worth of scruff wasn’t that noticeable.
I suspect that Hollywood has been at least a contributing factor. I’m not a follower or observer of trends, but I do notice that the unshaven look – as in, the look of not having shaved in several days – is now more or less the standard look of the A-list male movie star. By extension, therefore, I suppose it’s become fashionable among all those who want to look like one. There are even special shavers designed to maintain that fashionable scruffy look, which they achieve essentially by being designed to not shave properly.
The funny thing is that what is now regarded as fashionable would some decades ago have been regarded as a reliable indicator of a homeless bum. The other affectation of the Hollywood crowd is the inclination to wear an expensively tailored suit jacket but no tie and possibly a T-shirt under it. I think the idea is to convey the fact that you can afford very expensive suits, but you’re so careless of the cost that you use them for casual wear, and possibly for mopping up spills. Oddly enough, wearing someone’s cast-off suit jacket that matches nothing else is something else we’d expect from a homeless bum, so my recommendation to the fashion-conscious is to pay close attention to the grooming and clothing fashion of the homeless bums in your neighborhood. Imitate them, and you can be tomorrow’s fashion leader!
That said, I’m not a stickler for this sort of thing and now that I’m retired I don’t shave every day, either, and I thank A-list celebrities and homeless bums alike for making it fashionable!
Back in 1964 I had a colleague (math professor at U IL who shaved every Sunday. He took his electric razor and went all around his head and face leaving 1/8" shadow. During the week it lengthened until the following Sunday. Rinse (not!) and repeat.
I haven’t shaved in well over 50 years, but I haven’t especially noticed what the OP said.
I have definitely noticed it especially in the Boston area. I was always proud of my fast and efficient shaving abilities until I stopped doing it a few months ago. I just got a trimmer and I have gotten more compliments on my appearance since then than the previous 10 years combined. I will never go for the full hipster type neck beard but heavy stubble is definitely in now. I read a study that said that women prefer 10 day stubble over anything else.
I stopped shaving every day about 20 years ago. I have a pretty heavy beard, so it’s definitely noticeable. My routine, such as it is, is to shave 3 times during the week and never on the weekend. I could easily see that changing to once or twice a week. I’m not fond of wearing beard (been there, done that and didn’t care for it), despite the recent trend, so I probably won’t give it up completely. It seems that most men these days have a beard of some type.
I was one of the people who started the trend. Not on purpose, mind you, but because the skin on my face doesn’t like having a razor dragged across it more than once every 3-4 days.
Luckily for me, my need to shave coincided somewhat with the rise of Miami Vice AND I actually lived in South Florida, so my needs and current fashion managed to mysteriously sync up (mysterious that it would happen to me, eh).
My dad, from whom I get my own hypersensitive skin, complained bitterly about shaving for decades. It didn’t help he had pale skin and black hair. Due to societal bias against 5 o’clock shadow back in the day there were occasions he felt he had to shave twice in one day.
The last years of his life he sported a very closely trimmed beard - it spared his skin while still, I guess, feeling neat and manageable to him. I think younger men these days with the same issues might well favor the daily mowing of the “3-day-stubble”. Likewise men prone to in-grown beard hairs.
Probably a style thing for some, but for others it might well be a very practical choice.
I presume you mean the suit-jacket thing. Let me put it this way: if I’m going to a casual party, say, it’s not my usual practice to follow up jeans and a T-shirt with the jacket from a $10,000 suit. If I think it might be chilly I’ll put on a sweater, or wear a warmer long-sleeved shirt. The definition of “affectation” is something “that is artificial and designed to impress”. ISTM that something that has no discernible function yet is impractical or foolish for most ordinary people fits the definition.
Back to the subject of the OP, it’s amazing how ubiquitous this [un]shaven look is today. Here is the Armani website, for instance. If you scroll down there are two male models, and each one of them is sporting the aforementioned “homeless bum” shave. Not that I’m criticizing, you understand, as I sport the homeless bum shave myself, but it’s to avoid daily shaving, not to look fashionable.
But maybe David Letterman has us all beat. He has taken the unshaven look to new heights (or depths) with his post-retirement Santa Claus look!
