What have mustaches to do with typography

Question

It seems that mustaches is a recurring meme amongst creative people in areas of graphic design, typography etc.

I am referring to things like these t-shirts [1]

or these posters [1], [2], [3], [4]

blog posts like these [1]

as they directly mention typography for some reason.

Apparently there is some connection to characters "{" "}", although I am not too sure on that.

It all seemed a bit fetish-like to me (in a good funny way, though), although mentioning it here seemed to attract some negative responses from readers.

Would anyone be able to shed some light on this?

Answer 1

The curly-brace-as-mustache goes back to the early days of ASCII emoticons. :-{) If I recall correctly, it's not specifically mentioned in the Jargon File (still a great read, by the way) but it certainly predates that document.

Like all fashions, mustaches have run the cycle of cool, then out of date, then quirkily antique, then in style again. We're in the "quirky" phase at the moment, from what I can tell, and the availability of thousands of digital typefaces allows those with the right sense of humor to play with it.