“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”

I hate menswear.

Artist’s representation of the stock image I would like to use but cannot afford to use, alas

Back in February at the Spirit Awards, the director and tastemaker Benny Safdie pulled up on red carpet in a covetable piece of outerwear: an ultra-distressed Kapital boro spring jacket, season undetermined, which retails for around 2 Gs brand new. It’s one of those menswear grails that both heads and neophytes have saved deep in their screenshots folders, a flashy piece designed to wink at the broadest possible phylum of Grailed and Depop users. 

And yet Benny, I’m sorry to say, looked like a total bozo. The proportions were off; the outfit felt like an attempt to flex and little else. Safdie paired the jacket with vintage Ralph Lauren jeans that were way too skinny and an assortment of turquoise jewelry, which led some people to speculate that he was still in character as Dougie from The Curse, which is a generous read, but an incorrect one. (We are too nice to celebrities and too unkind to everyone else.) He looked like an aspiring apartment-tour TikToker who never looks at his checking account. (Sidenote, and I forgot who first said it, but is Kapital just Amiri for Japan fetishists? Makes u think.) 

Now, the blight wasn’t totally Benny’s fault. Menswear, as a whole, is down bad right now. After more than a decade of being 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, menswear is in a sinkhole. You know the Dune popcorn-bucket-cum-Fleshlight? Menswear is that right now. A spindly glory hole that, if you dare jam your dick in, tickles for a second but mostly makes you feel broke and sad.

There are a couple of things happening. These days, everyone’s personal style can be reduced to a Starter Pack. If you care about fashion, you’re instantly a gorp nerd or a suit guy or a dropcrotched Rick goth or most questionably, someone who pays a monthly fee for access to a menswear Substack that strives for post-irony but instead reads like it’s stippled with blaccent. You can’t tell how cool anyone is or how rich anyone is or what anyone reads. Menswear in 2024—and all its contingent style tribes—all exist within a big, queasy, uninspired mush. Men’s fashion, rather than opening new doors for identities to try on, has instead become the defining identity, as Benny demonstrated. Wearing an expensive jacket has never been interesting in itself.

We know more about designers and clothes than ever, but few can put it all together. It’s telling that the people who wear menswear the best right now are, like, Ayo Edibiri and Chinatown grandpas. I’d go so far to argue that there are only like five dudes in the whole menswear ecosystem who dress well, and three of them work at Condé Nast. (The platonic menswear outfit is meant to look like it was picked off the floor in a hurry because you woke up late but still feel expensive: Loewe, but with some dog hair on it or something.) 

The modern concept of menswear, to my mind, started off with The Sartorialist (OG problematic short king) before matriculating to Tumblr, only to  become truly  airborne when Mary H.K. Choi wrote her seminal 2010 Awl post, “All Dudes Learned How to Dress and It Sucks.” (In some ways we’re still experiencing exactly that.) Along the way, there was The Style Guy and Lookbook.nu and a handful of blogs that were notable because they actually had a point of view to offer.

But, as we all know, the algorithms and the piddling serotonin boosts we get from our daily three-plus hours of screen time on TikTok and Instagram have flattened taste and made personal style easily traceable. Millennial men in particular are always posting the same shit. Garments of historic import have been largely demystified; it’s hard to obscure your references when we’re all bookmarking the same Oakley Chop Saws spotted on Constant Practice and Organiclab.zip. Compounding matters is that the moodboards have become sentient, to varying degrees of creative success. JJJJound might have tricked us all into thinking that picking color palettes is an art form, but at least the stuff is nice sometimes. Sporty & Rich, um, well, uh, exists. 

The worst offender of this generation is, by far, the New York City brand Aimé Leon Dore, which is basically fast fashion with Supreme prices. 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. It’s fine to build a clothing brand rooted in personal geography. (See: Our Legacy, 18 East, Story MFG.) But nostalgia is easy, and, by definition, derivative. ALD is like a Ghostbusters reboot dressed up in DEI language. It purports to represent all the right things—good taste, downtown cool, an aspirational lifestyle—but if you look under the cortado lid, you’ll find it’s mostly empty. You’re just an uppity city boy with a large vinyl collection and pictures of sourdough on the grid. Which brings us to the other problem: Menswear, in its current iteration, is so painfully, tragically, white boy coded. 

I could go on. But that swirl is partially why menswear just isn’t exciting right now. There’s no tension. Nothing to rebel against. It’s so safe, so algorithmically formulated. The counterculturists like Supreme have gone mass (see also: Babenzian —> J. Crew) and the OG avant gardists—Rei, Yohji, Jun, Rick, Thom Browne even—have all been pushing the envelope for decades now. I came across an interview recently where Rei, in designing her collections, was like, “Punk is against flattery, and that’s what I like about it.” She’s 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. 

There are some signs that the next generation is almost ready to take the reins and perhaps make menswear exciting again. Mostly small indie brands like Greg Laboratory, which is experimenting with the modern uniform and interesting fabrics. 

Gen Z, at least, seems to finally be moving beyond easy Y2K nostalgia and developing a style rooted in archival that takes creativity and energy to put together. Recently, I worked on a project that required talking to a bunch of actually cool Gen Z teens to find out how they spend their time, and this finding really surprised me, in a good way…

When I asked what apps they were using the most, they said they were off TikTok and spending most of their time on the Pinterest app. They were decidedly anti-algorithm—or at least, anti-The Algorithm Everyone Else is Already On, and they seemed to want, more than anything else, someone with a perspective to offer: something that fashion magazines and other print media used to offer, only they were using curated Issey and Comme to figure out what they liked, to develop their own tastes in secret. These kids were looking to the past in order to sketch possible futures for themselves. And they didn’t even have to post about it. —Andy Sachs (He/him)