Until earlier this month, actor Timothée Chalamet could do no wrong … then he attended an event in New York with a newly sprouted moustache. Some called it a rare misstep, but Chalamet is in good company among a crop of high-profile men who have been bringing life to their top lips.

Atlanta rapper Lil Nas X, one of the most interesting dressers in menswear of late, has a subtle tache. Director Taika Waititi, who sported one to play Hitler in his recent film Jojo Rabbit, was last week seen on the Screen Actors Guild awards stage, his dictator-moustache grown-out and lustrous. Last year The Weeknd morphed his beard into a tache in time to walk the Uncut Gems red carpet; Eddie Murphy, a longtime wearer, sports one in Netflix’s recent Dolemite Is My Name; and Matthew Morrison, who played the cheesy teacher on Glee, recently unveiled his on reality TV.

In the fashion world, a glut of style stars are busily channelling Burt Reynolds. GQ editor Luke Day and Love magazine co-editor-in-chief Ben Cobb are pioneers with longstanding 70s taches. Day is a fan of “the hyper-masculine, super-sexualised vibe it gives someone … They make everyone look sexy. It’s the best accessory ever.” At Pitti Uomo this month, the Florentine fashion industry event where the world’s most stylish men come to peacock, a raft of street-style stars were snapped sporting one.While in some parts of the world moustaches are a perennial, the current trend in western culture “really started to gather momentum in 2019”, according to Brad Wicks of grooming brand the Bluebeards Revenge. He cites the face furniture of Robert Downey Jr and Chris Pratt in last year’s Avengers: Endgame.

It also comes off the back of the beard’s recent omnipresence. “The beard phase is on its way out,” says Lucinda Hawksley, author of Moustaches, Whiskers and Beards. “The moustache is the easiest way to keep facial hair.”

Taika Waititi with his post-Jojo Rabbit moustache. Photograph: Isa Foltin/Getty Images

Many moustache commentators also cite the impact of Movember, which launched in 2003 and sees men grow moustaches for a month to raise money for charity. Hawksley thinks that once people grow one, “they think ‘well I’ve made all this effort, I don’t want to shave it off now’.”

Part of their charm, for Freddy Furber, founder of the men’s grooming brand Percy Nobleman, is their versatility. “Everyone can name a guy with a great moustache, but no two great moustaches are the same,” he says. You need only to look to moustache-wearers of the past for evidence: think Jimi Hendrix’s fine, lip-skimming horseshoe compared to Clark Gable’s matter-of-fact line in Gone With the Wind. The moustache in 2020 is, Furber says, “slowly developing a new identity as a statement of individuality”.

It’s “a lovely word” that “conjures up villains and heroes, cowboys and leading men,” says Tony Glenville, of the London College of Fashion, who considers his moustache a “signature”. A moustache can also, he says, “be retro, from Victorian to 70s pornstar, Edwardian dandy, silver screen legend or whatever”. Many of the most stylish current examples tie neatly into the nostalgia for the shagpile 70s, in which the fashion industry has been luxuriating recently.

Taches have a long and chequered history: they have been favourites of dictators, from Stalin to Pinochet, perhaps because of the moustache’s perceived masculinity and long military history – as well, in western society, as often being tied up with racist tropes: see the thinly moustachioed Marvel villain Fu Manchu.

But throughout recent centuries in western culture, they have also been associated with romance. The Romantic poet Lord Byron sparked a trend with his in the early 19th century. Hollywood romantic leads of the 1920s, such as Ronald Colman, had what Hawksley calls “very slick little moustaches”. Cut to the 1980s and Tom Selleck’s moustache launched many a crush.

For the last couple of hundred years, they have been “a symbol of freedom, rebellion”, according to Hawksley. Soldiers returning from the first world war – where facial hair in general had been banned because it stopped gasmasks working, and only men of a certain rank were allowed gasmask-friendly taches – sparked a trend for taches in the 20s. “You as a man were in control of yourself … this was such a symbol of freedom and peace and rebelling against the societal norms.”

More recently, with their popularity in the wake of gay liberation, they have been read as a symbol of queer freedom.

Moustaches’ right-on history feels right for now, a time when a culture of activism pervades. Hawksley makes sense of the current resurgence by looking at that other recent halcyon era for the hirsute: “I think people at the moment are feeling really scared about the future and that was what was happening in the 60s and 70s. The peace and love movement, again it’s that rebellion against what is happening in the establishment.”

Facial hair, she says, “like all fashion, is so political… people are making protests with themselves.”