[URBAN NOTE] "Get Rid of Those Sideburns!"

[rfmcdonald]

In his enlightening Historicist feature for Torontoist, David Wencer explains how, well into the 1960s, something seemingly as conventional as sideburns was controversial in Toronto. This city used to be quite conservative, if you did not know.

In March of 1969, the National Ballet of Canada premiered its production of Grant Strate‘s Cyclus. Howard Marcus, one of the company’s most promising young dancers, was conspicuously absent from the premiere, and the Toronto newspapers soon revealed the reason why: artistic director Celia Franca refused to allow Marcus to perform on the grounds that his sideburns were too long. Marcus refused to trim them, and the Ballet subsequently terminated his contract.

Sideburns certainly weren’t completely new to Toronto in the 1960s, but they had been out of fashion for several decades. In the 19th century, it was fashionable for men to grow extremely long and thick sideburns, almost to the point of absurdity. Those that adopted this look in Toronto were frequently amongst the most prominent and respected citizens, including longtime Ontario Premier Oliver Mowat, piano manufacturer Samuel Nordheimer, and several of the city’s mayors. Allan Peterkin, in his 2001 book One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair, attributes the decline in popularity of sideburns at the end of the 19th century to “the advent of safety razor,” which enabled men to shave more frequently, without the higher level of skill generally needed for traditional razors.

With a few exceptions, sideburns were a rare sight in Toronto during the first half of the 20th century. By the mid-1960s, however, long hair and facial hair had grown popular with men immersed in North American and European counterculture. “Men were sprouting facial hair as an expression of individualism and creativity,” writes Peterkin. “Allegiance belonged to [new] cool tribes, who cultivated distinct looks but shared a discontent with urban, middle-class life.”

In 1960s Toronto, long hair and beards were soon associated with Yorkville, which emerged as the centre of the city’s bohemian community. In Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s, Stuart Henderson observes that “Yorkville’s hip aesthetics were lagging behind the curve of most stylish urban centres in Europe and North America…[but] by midsummer, 1964, Yorkville’s hip archetype was developed around the hirsute male…By early 1965, archetypal Villagers sported long hair (over the ears, the eyebrows, touching the collar) and a beard (where hormonally possible).”