Even if you are not in my specific corner of the internet, you might have encountered a recent piece that claimed [Amma, please avert your eyes] menswear is “a spindly glory hole that, if you dare jam your dick in, tickles for a second but mostly makes you feel broke and sad.” Vivid!
The rant1 is worth the read, largely because it’s as stuffed with mic-drop-worthy liners as a blue/black North Face puffer2, but it mostly made me feel bad for the anonymous writer. Set aside the piece’s (dubious) history of “menswear” as something that began in the aughts—it was apparently “once an exciting space for creativity, self-discovery, self-expression and broadcasting personal aesthetics in order to attract like-minded people whose sensibilities matched your own” thanks to blogs with “a point of view to offer,” but now it’s “so safe, so algorithmically formulated” because we have “nothing to rebel against”—and you’re mostly left with a limp list of specific designers/pieces/newsletters3/trends the writer doesn’t really like.
I agree with a lot of those specific takes. The clothes at Aimé Leon Dore are totally fine, but the people who wear them tend to be insufferable. It’s true that a lot of people are much more focused on being able to recount the biographic details of the person who designed their shirt (or better, the sheep that produced its wool) than on how they can wear it in interesting ways.4 And the idea of handing over any of my money to a company called “Sporty & Rich” fills me with despair.
Still, if pictures of terribly dressed celebrities makes you feel broke and sad, that’s kind of a you problem. I think the writer is seeking something from “menswear” that you can really only get from cognitive behavioral therapy. In the writer’s telling, menswear was good when it served as a way for men to set themselves apart from other men. Indeed, this was the theme of the Mary H.K. Choi blog from 20105 he linked: it is a annoying you can’t as easily use someone’s outfit to determine if talking to someone is worth your time. In the halcyon time before Tumblr, a crappy fit meant you could ignore its wearer. But today, the ranter says, you can’t use an outfit to tell “how cool anyone is or how rich anyone is or what anyone reads.” Even those with genocidal politics know their pants can’t be too slim.
The clothes we choose to wear speak volumes before we open our mouths. But the idea that menswear was better when it functioned to help us more easily sort people into buckets of worth talking to/not worth talking to is nuts to me. Believe me, I practice what I preach. I have more than one friend that wears Allbirds.
I guess my main issue is the essay both claims menswear is a “big, queasy, uninspired mush” that doesn’t offer “identities to try on”, but also something that can easily be reduced into groups of singular aesthetics. It’s weird that someone who wants clothes to serve as a portal to new identities would poo-poo the idea of the “Starter Pack.” Isn’t that literally what you’re asking for?
It feels like a more thoughtful critique of menswear could have taken aim at the fact that a lot of its most established experts, be they established (publishers like GQ and Esquire), upstart (Throwing Fits, infinite Substacks) or startup (Instagram and TikTok are by no means startups but is not a startup anymore but whatever), have basically just become affiliate-link hucksters. Instead of providing considered styling advice and intimate portraits of weird subcultures, these platforms tell us the way out of personal style funks is to buy more clothes.
I don’t think this is their fault! These type of content always perfoms well, both in amount of audience and how much money it makes. The “Best Jeans for 2024” story might be annoying to you, but it’s almost always getting more audience than the more meaty stuff. TikTokers can whine about how the TikTok Shop is ruining the app, but even before it was announced, so much of the content you’d see on your For You page could be summarized as “Buy this, it’ll fix your problem.”
The piece ended somewhat predictably for screeds like this: Gen Z is the solution! They are wisely avoiding TikTok in favor of … Pinterest, an app that has never ever been associated with a dominant and deeply bland aesthetic. Thank you, Gen Z!
Anyways, the whole thing left kind of a sour taste in my mouth. So, being a humble “service” journalist, I decided to share some tips for how to make menswear, as a hobby feel less awful.
Look for inspiration offline. The teens that are looking at old Issey and Comme Des Garcon for silhouettes, color combos and textures they can emulate and color are probably having a lot more fun than those looking for advice on their Explore page.
Slow down. Let your tastes evolve over time, instead of just trying to change your whole look as quickly as you can. A good rule of thumb: if you see an influencer wearing something, don’t buy it!
For the love of god, get some friends. Dressing yourself is a deeply personal affair—obviously, you start the process naked. But talking to people about your clothing curiosities can scratch a lot of the same itch as blind copping. I promise.
(Come back tomorrow for your previously scheduled link dump)
I am about to devote far too may serious words to a quick, funny blog. Apologies in advance.
My faves: “It’s telling that the people who wear menswear the best right now are, like, Ayo Edibiri and Chinatown grandpas.” … “The fact that ALD—a brand whose whole cinematic universe can be distilled down to ‘What if we dressed like 9/11 never happened?’—is at the forefront of menswear says a lot about how dire things have gotten and how bereft we are of actual creativity." …. “[Rei Kawakubo is] right of course—the best clothes should offend other people’s sensibilities—but it’s hard to continually introduce fresh ideas when you’re the same age as Joe Biden.”
Writing this piece as fast as I can before Jonah and Erin (hopefully) drop their retort in Blackbird Spyplane tomorrow.
SHAMELESS SELF-PROMO ALERT: I wrote about the appeal of “Clothes with a backstory” back in June of ‘22