The mo can be dapper and funny - it’s down to you how to make your mo count! In this one, writer Matt Wingett has gone for the circus strongman look!
With November on its way, or Movember - the month in which men grow moustaches for charity - Matt Wingett looks at the history of Movember. Find out more about Movember here: www.movember.com
ittle acts of originality can make a massive difference. Just so with the case of the group of four men who got together one afternoon in 2003 in a pub in Melbourne,
Australia looking at people passing by on the street. Luke Slattery, co-founder of the Movember
movement recalls: “We were sitting around looking at all
the fashions that had come back - cords, fl ares, stripes and plaid. And we wondered what from our childhood hadn’t come back. We decided there were two things - the moustache and macrame.” The friends thought it would be fun to
make the moustache fashionable again - and then as they discussed it more, decided that growing a moustache for charity would also make those facial follicles do some good in the world. Over the following weeks, the friends
found out about prostate and testicular cancer and how many men it affects.
Inspired by female friends who raised money for breast cancer awareness with dinners and other events, the friends decided to hold their fi rst moustache-growing month in November 2003. But what to call it? The answer was
inspired - take the mo from moustache and put it at the front of November - and voila! A world movement is born! In the fi rst year, thirty friends participated
and as Luke admits: “We didn’t really make much money for charity.” But the guys who’d taken part had to
explain why their upper lips had suddenly sprouted hair - and this meant that every day they were telling friends, acquaintances and colleagues all about Movember. Come the second year, 450 people
participated and they raised just over AUS $55,000. The team presented the cheque to the Prostate Cancer Foundation. It was the single largest cheque they received that year. By 2006 the movement was becoming massive, and the four friends realised they