Social historians will record that in the early twenty-first century the fashion for a clean-shaven face lost its dominance in metropolitan North American bourgeois society. (The no-nonsense goatee-mustache, associated with manliness, had long been a very well-liked provincial look.) It was permissible, and often chic, to sport stubble, even in formal settings. A full beard was almost de rigueur for younger white males who wanted to signal that they occupied, or deserved to occupy, a prestigious role in the culture economy. The more elaborate and antiquated the beard, the more credible the signal. Emperor Franz Joseph himself could have…