Ten years ago this January, in the deepest part of Brooklyn (okay, the Lorimer stop on the L train) a shadowy organization was born from Chris Rubino’s beard. Long, lanky and Italian, Rubino was a natural born beard prophet. His Garibaldi came in lush and thick. His roommate, Sean Donnelly, saw his friend’s prodigious whiskers, and, citing his lineage and personal experience, doubted his own ability to grow similar facial foliage. At Rubino’s urging, he tried anyway and to his surprise, it filled in monstrously. The next year, it was on. The fellas coined the term Bearduary, first, to denote the months in mid-winter-NYC when it made the most sense to have a beard as protection from the elements, and second, to have a quick answer to anyone who inquired after their generous bristles. “It was not very common to see men with large beards in Brooklyn back then, which is almost impossible to imagine now,” remembers Donnelly. Rubino, a visual artist and commercial designer, and Donnelly, a video producer and animator, caught the attention of like-minded creatives who were duly impressed by the mission of Bearduary — which, to be clear, when it started was to grow a beard in January and February. There weren’t any other rules. Very shortly a website was born, with men casually submitting weekly photos to document their follicular progress. Some, like Rubino, were born to the task, and others, like Donnelly needed the support of others to sprout their impressive crumb catchers. The progress photos uploaded to the site created a sense of camaraderie in the ever-expanding group. Of course, at first, most of the photos came from men the founders knew personally. Before hipster irony became a cliché among the Brooklyn bearded, there always seemed an element of the art-prank to Bearduary. One early shave-off party at a downtown ad agency’s offices featured a full-fledged photo studio on one floor with a photographer shooting high-contrast, stark black and white portraits of the beardos with a grit and depth of detail more associated with Irving Penn than half-sozzled Brooklynites. As digital photography arrived in everyone’s pockets on phones, the weekly photos — selfies before we had the neologism to describe them — started trickling in from ever more disparate locales and fewer and fewer of the eyes staring back at Donnelly were familiar. Donnelly’s still unsure where most of the expansion chapters came from. “People just send them in. You can tell when there must have been weird press from different parts of the planet, because all of a sudden a cluster will show up from a new country.”
In 2008, a contingent of the New York beardos were shaved en plein air in Rockefeller Center by gentlemen barbers as throngs of tourists watched for a segment of The Today Show. “At that time in my life, if I was hanging out with 20 guys at 7 a.m., it usually meant we were still out from the night before, says Donnelly, who these days is more apt to be fried from child-rearing duties than a night of carousing. When the segment ended, a couple of participants were left with half-shaven faces, which was pretty surreal in Midtown.” It would have been Bearduary’s most surreal moment, had it not been followed by the freshly shorn guys bursting through a paper screen of the sort you’d find at a high school pep rally to unveil the “shaggy-to-shaved” makeovers and were handed canapés by Padma Lakshmi. The next season’s shave-off may have been lower profile, but still held its share of surprises. It was supposed to be a low-key: just a Brooklyn bar offering specials to anyone sporting facial hair for the occasion. The day before the party Donnelly and Rubino received an email from the alias “Korean Abdul-Jabbar” with the subject line “I want you to throw your hotdog down my hallway.” The sender included a picture of herself, a petite asian girl, and told the guys that she was working on a coffee table book for Vice. She had a tattoo right above her derriere that read “I Heart Beards.” The book project she was working on featured photographs of her tattoo next to bearded men, she said, and asked if she could come to the closing party for Bearduary. The guys were pretty sure they were being trolled, but said, why not? That is until the girl, Kari, showed up with a seamless and a cameraman and set up in a back corner of the bar. “My strongest memory is definitely my face inches from her bare ass posing for photos with her beard tattoo,” Donnelly recalls. “She was really nice and came across as a girl who liked beards. Supposedly she did glom on to a friend of a beardo at the party and took him for some cash a few months later.” Which made more sense a month later when Kari né Korean Abdul-Jabbar became much more well-known (and wanted by the authorities) as the so-called hipster grifter, eventually turning herself in to police in Philadelphia for a host of indiscretions. Ten years on, things may be a bit more subdued for Bearduary, but pictures continue to come into Donnelly’s inbox from all over the world with ambitions to reach further. “I’m gonna try my best to get somebody on the international space station to join in. There has to be some good science behind beard growth in space.” Your move, NASA.
Originally published at fiveoclock.harrys.com. Words by John Capone. Illustration by Tim Lahan
