T Magazine: The New Look
Hermès suit, $4,375, hermes.com. Margaret Howell shirt, $475, margarethowell.co.uk.Loewe shoes, $950, loewe.com. Vintage socks, $92, meletmercantile.com.
Photograph by Robbie Fimmano. Styled by Jason Rider
While many men care about what they wear — the style, cut, fabric and even maker of their clothing — few would claim to be followers of “men’s fashion,” a term that seems like an oxymoron to most. Yet today’s slimmer jackets, tighter shirts and straighter-legged pants — even your naked ankles — are the distinct sartorial fallout of the designs that trekked down the runways of New York and Paris over a decade ago. Think trickle-down economics, but for fashion. You could likely trace the ancestral lineage of the clothes in your closet to their radical progenitors: Raf Simons, Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme or Thom Browne.
Alexander Fury’s Sign of the Times essay on the exciting, provocative and rather poetic moment men’s wear is having right now, shows how, at its best, fashion can be an incubator of ideas, a means for shifting our thinking, a way of altering how we view ourselves and our world. So just because you won’t be rocking your man cleavage any evening soon or wearing a skirt on casual Fridays — and no one thinks you should! — realize it takes guts to challenge norms and conventions, and talent to do it artfully. In the late 1930s, the American fashion designer and writer Elizabeth Hawes wondered why, in the pounding heat of summer, men wear suits with their shirts tucked in, buttoned up and tied with a knot. Where is the sense in that? Talk about fashion victims! A man’s uniform is quite confining, and on the London runways in particular, those confines are loosening, the strictures of gender norms slackening and permission given to dip into new tropes. There’s a bit of bra burning for men going on here.
Will it change you? Will it change how you dress? Check back with me in 10 years.
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