You Know a Trend Is Dead . . .

. . . When Conservatives Jump on Board.


Just when the Right finally found its inner metrosexual in the American Spectator's publishing of Mark Gavreau Judge's paeans to Saks, swing dancing, Polo, and imported after-shave lotion, the New York Times reports that the wascally wabbits behind today's fashions are growing their beards out, donning plaid shirts, buying log cabins with their Log Cabin Republican life partners, and, for all we know, designing fashionable blue denim trousers that are already frayed at the heels at time of purchase (as mine inevitably are after a couple of weeks, I don't know why).

It's true. Actors are sporting bushy beards, and even male runway fashion models are wearing long, unruly, shocks of facial hair. These furry beasts are trundling down Broaday, Michigan Avenue, Rodeo Drive, and our other most fashionable thoroughfares, no doubt shopping for high-fashion gumboots, tool belts, and bad toupees, loading up on chips and bock beer in a crash effort to develop beer guts, and loosening their wide, black leather belts so that the backs of their green work pants slide down and expose their butt cracks as do all good blue-collar gentlemen.

How close we may be to the return of the bushy, waxed-up eybrow look (which worked so well for the great character actor C. Aubrey Smith), I shudder to think.