Our Unwitting Journey Towards Lumbersexual Fashion

"Though he works for a software company he looks like he just walked out of the forest:  His beard is shaggy, (he wears) the boots and shirt of a lumberjack.  The Lumbersexual man, with his savage style,  is displacing the Metrosexual in the urban landscape."

-Rough translation of the opening paragraph of following article from Cochabamba's "Los Tiempos":

  Adiós metrosexuales, el "lumbersexual" salió del bosque

 The Spanish-speaking media recently picked up on the what has, at least from our perspective, become a slowly developing trend over the past few years:  The rise of the Lumbersexual.

 If you need a primer on what exactly is a Lumbersexual, Tom Puzak, writing over at GearJunkie.com, who's work is referenced in the Los Tiempos article, sums it up well in the following article:

  The Rise of the Lumbersexual

 Fashion is not our forté here at The Mint, but this trend is somewhat personal as we have unwittingly begun to embrace it. The seeds for this fashion trend, at least in the Portland area, were planted by the publicity tactics of the Portland Timbers in 2011, who at the time began to drape billboards and painted buildings in the city with images of men, women, and children wielding chainsaws and axes.  This continues to some extent today.

 With this subliminal messaging firmly embedded in our subconscious, we were thrust into the Lumbersexual style via our well publicized tree incident back in 2012, in which an unfortunate household accident caused us to get in touch with our inner lumberjack (Scroll down to the "Black Locust" heading on this link).  While we had the larger tree felled by an arborist, we purchased the requisite chainsaw and the other tools of the lumberjack and went at the beast in our yard until we could no more.  We left it for the winter.

 The following summer, our inner lumberjack was summoned once again when the HOA presented us with an ultimatum to "get the wood off of our lawn."

 While we had the tools (we have since moved up to an 8 pound axe and added a 9' pole saw to our arsenal), it was not until two years ago that we began to wear a beard.  We simply felt it was time.  The only time we had worn a beard before was for two unfortunate weeks in the mid '90s when we contracted the chicken pox at 19 years of age and we were unable to shave under the threat of permanent scarring.  When we began to hear reports that men in Miami, who could not grow a beard, were paying up to $8,000 for facial implants, we knew we were squarely in the middle of a fashion trend, a rarity for The Mint.

The Lumbersexual Look circa 2013

Where did it all start?  While Lumberjacks have been admired, especially here in the Land of Giants, from time immemorial, we like to attribute the latest trend to comedic origins such as Monty Python:

 

 And Red Green:

 

Whatever the origins, the Lumbersexual is now out of the Forest and into the Urban landscape.  For the sake of the trees, it come as a relief that most of us wield iMacs instead of axes.