Men's Fashion Thread - Page 380

On November 16 2015 06:52 andyrau wrote:
articles about fashion

On November 16 2015 08:15 IgnE wrote:
I didn't notice the author indicating that the fashion trends he was talking about had "emasculating effects." He seemed to be drawing a distinction between the sterile, blue-collar masculine aesthetic of the last century in contrast to new trends, or perhaps making a connection between that aesthetic and the restraint it enforces on fashion still today.

But I think it's funny that you think an article about fashion is more pretentious than actually wearing $10k worth of clothes on a Wednesday.

On November 16 2015 10:00 IgnE wrote:
Do you think heterogeneous and homosexual culture is not having an effect on the fashion of the traditional white male?

This puts into relief one of #menswear’s central innovations: dressed-down clothes executed luxuriously—like an artfully distressed Japanese chambray work shirt—which assert a classless identity that is, conveniently, also a signifier of class. Skeptics will say that menswear merely created a new way for rich people to dress. A more charitable view holds that menswear has undermined the outmoded class hierarchy of men’s fashion, which forced men either to dress like “the man” or to stick it to him, sartorially speaking.

Hegemonically masculine men, meanwhile, don’t look kindly upon those who relinquish the privilege of unfashionableness: come into work wearing a too-cool shirt, and your unhip coworkers will shame you. In those environments, the #menswear uniform—short blazer, trim shirt, skinny jeans, double-monks, no socks—would be completely beyond the pale.

On November 16 2015 19:31 zulu_nation8 wrote:
lot of things wrong with the article but it's cool to see internet fashion get props in a major cultural criticism periodical.

...

Even though it's hard to write about fashion and most of the stuff comes off as nonsense, it's more annoying to read an article about fashion and its culture that either disregards or completely screw up the aesthetics, and instead be too busy summarizing politics and attributing some hidden meaning to it all.

As a man who enjoys clothes, I often find the postmodern nature of menswear frustrating. I want to dress like myself, and not like James Bond, Steve McQueen, Sartre, or some action figure I owned when I was a kid. (Of course, dressing like “oneself” raises other problems of authenticity.) From time to time, the simplicity of choosing to be hegemonically unfashionable exerts an appeal; so does the adaptable invisibility of “normcore.” Still, today’s profusion of colorful menswear is infinitely superior to the barren landscape that existed just a decade ago. Men dress better now. And menswear has made it more interesting to be a man. When I was in college, in the late nineties and early aughts, straight-white-male identity was more rigid and unreflective. It was never supposed to think about itself. That’s less true now, for a whole host of reasons, and menswear is one of them.

On November 16 2015 13:46 andyrau wrote:

thats a bad question, the answer's far more multi-faceted
i'm not saying the author's wrong wrong, but singlehandedly attributing the shifts in styles to a subculture and a change in demographics is pretty dumb. pop culture isn't something where u can definitively say A + B = C when C + A = B could also very well be true. sometimes the cause is also part of the effect, if that makes any sense.

see why this is pretentious