Do We Still Need Menswear?
Trapped in the past, what is its future?
Hello! A publication commissioned a piece from me on menswear in the context of today (May 2024 at the time), and then the editor promptly went out of commission. After months of emailing to try and figure out what in the world was going on, I got the go-ahead to do whatever I wanted with the dang thing. Instead of letting what I think is a piece filled with gems from some of the most brilliant menswear minds of our generation go to seed, I’m posting it here. Thanks especially to
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Earlier this year, in Hate Read, an offshoot of writer Delia Cai’s prolific newsletter
, a then-anonymous author railed against the current state of menswear, its unbridled bile reverberating through the r/Menswear gauntlet, disgruntling the side of TikTok that earnestly refers to clothes as “jawnz,” and eliciting a rebuttal by the iconic menswear writer Derek Guy for Mr. Porter’s journal. The piece’s description of 2024 menswear as “A spindly glory hole that, if you dare jam your dick in, tickles for a second but mostly makes you feel broke and sad” initiated a collective moment of reckoning, like a cocked rifle poking out from behind the velveteen Substack curtain. Taking aim at the Starter Packification of algorithmically-oriented aesthetic codes (e.g. “gorp nerd” or “suit guy”), fast fashion’s lack of genuine aura, and a decline in punk ethos as many feted designers age out of their radical sensibilities (“It’s hard to continually introduce fresh ideas when you’re the same age as Joe Biden”), this Hate Read posits the question: what is menswear, nowadays?“Menswear is hopelessly boring,” declares Avery Trufelman at the beginning of her deep dive into the history of suits for
. The podcast episode traces ‘menswear’, as we might recognize its contours, back to the Great Male Renunciation, a late-18th century phenomenon with a name that sounds as cheesily arbitrary as the societal shift truly was: because aristocratic women had begun to adapt what at that point were traditionally-male stylings like the high heel, the Enlightenment’s glorification of masculine-coded pragmatism initiated an unceremonious rejection of these ‘gratuitous’ adornments, and the conception of mens’ clothes as fabric membranes to, in the words of menswear icon G. Bruce Boyer, “keep people in, [and] keep people out” was born.While the hottest among us have long toyed with shopping on both sides of a fast-crumbling menswear/womenswear divide, young brands like K.ngsley and Luar started from square one without ever creating gendered collections, even eschewing the dichotomous categories in their online stores. The fact that many such brands were founded by queer people of color should be duly noted – it’s unsurprising that the vanguard of loosening gender norms in fashion is led by designers not mired in oft-straight-and-white conventions. They may never have been afforded the associated privilege, the secret sauce necessary to romanticize a past defined by couch-staining Japanese denim and unnervingly-pristine Herschel Supply Co. backpacks.
In the weeks since his Hate Read was published, Chris Gayomali, a former GQ features editor and writer of the wellness newsletter
, has gone public as its writer. The idea that, in Gayomali’s words, “menswear is a fusty distinction, and great clothes can be found on any rack” continues to burrow into the collective consciousness of “enlightened stylish people,” a classification that flips the bird to the Enlightenment proper and suggests that our generation’s Great Renunciation could be of the gender binary as it exists sartorially—one of the few concessions Gayomali’s Hate Read affords during its thorough dressing-down is that non-men like Ayo Edeberi shoulder a lion’s share of menswear’s coolness quotient (a sentiment widespread enough to be corroborated by GQ), playing around with Loewe suits and Bottega Veneta trench coats as men like Jacob Elordi are feted for their handbag habits and willingness to get a little slutty in a Dion Lee corset.Why, then, does menswear still exist as a category adhered to by the vast majority of suit-sellers and tie-hawkers? The answer among menswear experts is seemingly unanimous: people get spooked by ambiguity in their shopping. Menswear guru Jonah Weiner suggests that “for all the headlines about a rise in gender-fluid style, the market at large still likes neat, tidy, straightforwardly legible categories,” a sentiment Gayomali whittles to a finer point, shuddering that “the thought of being 120 SSENSE sale tabs deep versus, like, 11 max sounds kind of like a nightmare.”
Aside from anxieties around ambiguity, Gayomali believes that the nostalgia characterizing much of mainstream menswear is the most damning contributor to its tedium. One of his favorite takes on the matter comes from essayist Judith Thurman, who wrote in a 2005 edition of The New Yorker that “Conventional fashion, and particularly its advertising, is a narrative genre—historical romance at one end of the spectrum and science fiction at the other.” Gayomali suggests that the present state of menswear as a canon of clothing with “...no tension [and] nothing to rebel against” is symptomatic of an attachment to the historical end of this sliding scale, perhaps caught in a chicken-and-egg current of being “painfully, tragically, white boy coded”—is the dominant narrative of whiteness across the annals of sartorial history both the cause and effect of a societal addiction to referencing the past instead of envisioning new futures on the runway?
Weiner, who along with partner Erin Wylie created
, an early-adapter Substack that helped revolutionize the fundamental idea of what a fashion publication could read like, agrees that menswear is caught in a backward-gazing riptide, though cites a more recent era’s influence, noting that “On one level, 'menswear' retains a specific '00s-era connotation in its DNA, because that's the time when this sector of the apparel industry really boomed, and was consecrated into a certain ‘urban creative class upwardly mobile male’ aesthetic.” To borrow the Spyplane tradition of eager acronym-ification, this “UCCUMM” aesthetic seems like an obvious euphemism for “white” style, replete with “waxed Filson shoulder bags, slim selvedge denim and flat-front chinos, Clarks desert boots, [and] gingham J. Crew shirts”—but Weiner quickly clarifies that “virtually no one who cares about clothes is wearing that now.”The self-conscious distancing from these “totemic” elements of menswear’s cultural apex is as subtle as a neon sign pointing to the dominant force at play in the men’s fashion world of 2024: shame, which waxes and wanes around different facets of the industry. An increase in expectations for men’s fashion, lest one find themself pictured in the opening tweet of a @dieworkwear thread, does put pressure on a group that’s less used to being judged on its aesthetic sensibilities than those who didn’t come up dressing in plaid Bermuda shorts and low-top Vans. At the same time, as Weiner puts it, the idea that “a dude who cares about clothes quote unquote too much is, to put it kindly, a little ridiculous” has made itself known as the inevitable flip side to the shiny coin of caring about something in a publicly visible way.
On the other hand, writer Rachel Tashjian Wise commented on Gayomali’s hate read, tweeting “I believe we are dealing here with a double-edged sword: the end (at least for the coastal elite and those who listen to their podcasts) of MASCULINE SHAME!” In the right light, this rings true: “men are increasingly inspired by the textures, colour palettes, and cuts of womenswear,” as per writer
, and the gendered commercial constructs deployed by fashion brands only become more permeable as the 21st century creeps along, with brands that started out as menswear-exclusive, famously including Bode and Kith, expanding to create a coherent oeuvre that folds womenswear into the mix.Though Cheslaw often takes inspiration from the stylings of the women in his life, he believes that the binary distinction is commercially necessary because the “cuts of the clothes [for menswear vs womenswear] are different, so unless we're moving to a much baggier, boxier look for all—which I think would be a shame—I'm not sure we can do away with menswear as a category.” Considering that there’s no one way a woman’s or man’s body must be built to qualify it as acceptable in its gender identity, not to mention the growing presence of nonbinary fashion plates, this point is well on its way to being rendered moot, revealing anxiety and confusion to be the main drivers of menswear’s staying power as a category: “Most consumers, especially straight, cis guys, can't even be trusted to find pants that fit well, let alone pronounce Loewe,” as Gayomali dolefully puts it.
The crux of Trufelman’s podcast episode comes when she arrives at the thorny truth that during the Great Male Renunciation, “men of wealth and power slowly realized it was best to keep their cards close to their vests, to not risk looking ridiculous or frivolous. In the rising tide of liberalism, power and wealth became about restraint and distance.” “Menswear” as it exists today is running on the fumes of a deeply-rooted, class-based anxiety. Its many faces—the fear of becoming a main character of sartorial Twitter for a day, the ultimately arbitrary desire for a precise definition of a “male” body, sheer overwhelm in the face of too many SSENSE tabs—reveal a slowly but steadily encroaching reality: “menswear” doesn’t have to exist.
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