Class conscious - Andrew Martin can't get away with the unshaven look
Published 09 May 2005
Ideally, today's unshaven look is a double bluff: scruffy but with licence to be so
My week was bounded by two social slights. At the start of it, I delivered a letter by hand to a well-known media organisation. In order to do so, I approached the delivery bay while pushing my bicycle, only to be waved away by the man behind the delivery-bay window. "Park your bike before you come here," he said, peremptorily. I did as he asked, and then handed over my letter in resentful silence. As I walked away, I noticed a sign instructing cycle and motorcycle couriers to park their machines well away from the delivery bay. I had been mistaken for a cycle courier.
Later in the week, I cycled to exclusive Jermyn Street, where Hawes & Curtis, shirt-maker to the well-off, is marking its 92nd anniversary. Rather an arbitrary figure to choose to celebrate, you might think, but consider this: in precisely eight years' time, the company will be 100 years old. To mark the Big 92, it is holding a sale at its two shops in Jermyn Street. All shirts are half price, and the promotion is accompanied by photographs of some of the firm's famous customers of the past, including George VI, Earl Mountbatten, Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby. These individuals have one thing in common: they are clean-shaven. And yet the male models advertising the current range of Hawes & Curtis shirts have Jose Mourinho five o'clock shadow, to a man.
The last time I bought an item of clothing in Jermyn Street, I did so standing next to a man who, when the shop assistant bade him "Good day", replied: "Definitely." I accept that the world is changing and I am being left behind, but all I ask for is a bit of consistency.
A few yards away from Hawes & Curtis in Jermyn Street is the top people's barbers, Trumper's, which is still proud of providing the closest possible wet shave with - and I don't think I'm overdramatising this - a series of pearl-handled, cut-throat razors, the blades of which are discarded after a single use.
I was brought up to believe it was poor form not to appear clean-shaven at all times. To my father, unshaven men were shifty, along with men who lived in flats or had unnecessary mudflaps on their Ford Cortinas. I can see that today the unshaven look is a sort of double bluff: it says, I may look slightly scruffy, but then I have the licence to do so, not being under the thumb of some censorious middle manager. A five o'clock shadow also makes a man look as though he's just climbed off a red-eye flight from America. It implies preoccupation and busyness: a lot of supermodels bedded, a pressing need to talk on a mobile phone.
I might try this jet-lagged look myself if I felt I could get away with it. The trouble is that I don't develop a five o'clock shadow. It's more like . . . half past two. My beard is not a continuum, but closer in resemblance to a pointillist painting, and coloured red at that. I had a relative (now dead) who had bright red hair, and every time I begin to grow a beard it's as if he's coming out of me, like ectoplasm. Basically, I look like a homeless person when I haven't shaved, and suffer a drop in the respect accorded to me. Which brings me to the second slight.
I walked into a second-hand north London bookshop run by an elderly toff. I've often been in there, and have prided myself on being allowed to view the stock on the remote and little-used top two floors even though I might be carrying a bag or briefcase, whereas other customers had been required to leave their bags on the ground floor as a precaution against theft. "Can I go up to the top floor?" I asked the proprietor, whose glance immediately began flickering from the bag in my hand to my - for once - unshaven cheeks.
"Certainly," he replied, "but would you mind leaving your bag down here?"
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