Out of Fashion
I’ve had a hard time writing about fashion lately. Publishing is the bigger problem, since the words still come out as fast and quick as they always have. Yet they feel less inspired, less necessary than they once were. I mine my Google Docs every couple of weeks, greeted by draft after draft of unpublished work. My confidence in my writing hasn’t changed, my drive to write remains the same, but something holds me back.
Jason Schwartzman as Max Fischer in Rushmore.
For a while, I thought I was burnt out from fashion after moving back to Minneapolis. Yet struggle and change have never stopped me from writing before, so I then considered my block a byproduct of my job as an e-commerce stylist, where I spend half my workday writing notes to clients. The problem with that theory is that I still have plenty of energy to (and do) write after work, and I think about fashion whether I’m on or off the clock. Last weekend, the source of my difficulty dawned on me: The niche topics I had loved, that had grown so familiar to me, have had their day in the sun. The culture has changed, and we now live in a more chaotic, anarchic age of dressing.
Fashion is right back where it was 50 years ago, not in terms of trends, but in the dichotomy between tribalism and individual style. When I started blogging about fashion in 2016, there were still several “types” that dominated menswear. Workwear, Ivy style, and streetwear guided men in developing a fashion sense. Now their lines have blurred, the trends themselves have died and been reincarnated, remixed. A lot of what I wrote about focused on creating a blueprint for men to dress well, and those guiding principles no longer feel relevant. I’ve disregarded some of them myself.
From 2007 to 2017, give or take a couple years (depending on if you live on the coasts or in the middle of the country), men’s fashion was an outgrowth of hipsterism. Most style-minded men weren’t wearing jeans as skinny as those sold at Urban Outfitters (a mistake I made during my high school years, yet that I look back fondly on), yet slim, dark denim, flannel shirts, and oxford collar button-downs were signifiers of good taste. If these garments were made in America — along with one’s boots, t-shirts, penny loafers, sneakers, and outerwear — all the better. Homegrown clothing became unfashionable after Trump’s election in 2016, and the clout attached to these garments disappeared. Wearing a chore coat, selvedge denim, or New Balance sneakers, for example, isn’t passé in and of itself today, but it needs more of an angle than heritage, prep, or normcore.
Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss in No Country For Old Men.
Where do we go from here? One possible route is embracing the roots and contradictions of one’s own introduction to fashion. My style was an outgrowth of the Western wear Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) sported in No Country For Old Men. After watching it with my dad as an impressionable 16-year old, I went out and bought five Western shirts from Urban Outfitters. As a culturally curious teenager, I found more film characters whose style — though not their actions and mannerisms — made their way into my wardrobe. Ryan Gosling’s cardigans and Fair Isle sweaters from Lars and the Real Girl and Max Fischer’s (Jason Schwartzman) chunky frames and prep school cool from Rushmore made indelible imprints on me, and they remain part of my wardrobe today, just in a more grown up way. I also run in a t-shirt that looks eerily similar to Paulie Bleeker’s (Michael Cera) in Juno, but that’s more to do with the dearth of good looking athletic wear.
Acknowledging our beginnings is a good first step toward individualism, though dressing like our 16-year old selves isn’t the solution. Rather it’s about embracing the openness and curiosity many people lose soon thereafter. A 2018 study by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz of the New York Times found that “...the majority of us, when we are grown men and women, predictably stick with the music that captured us in the earliest phase of our adolescence.” A similar conclusion can be drawn with style, and the looks we favor tend to be outgrowths of our tastes as teenagers. I live in my navy Club Monaco merino wool cardigan once fall rolls around, and I still wear Western shirts at 26 (though my current one is denim rather than the plaids I owned in my adolescence). The brands may be different, but the styles are evolutions of what I’ve worn over the past 10 years. In David Coggins’ Men and Style, the late Glenn O’Brien quipped that when he was a kid, “...I dressed the way I dress now.” Yet he found new ways to do it and garments to do it with as his experience, career, and means changed, and that’s the key to creating individuality in style, making constant tweaks until hitting on something new — or remixed.
Finding that individuality is more important than ever, because tribalism is done for — momentarily. Today’s two loudest tribes are Trumpists and the alt-right. You shall know them by their MAGA hats, white polos, and billowing khaki pants. Their emergence catalyzed the rebellion against fashion types. Anarchic modes of dressing are a direct response to Trump’s unexpected victory, and while we won’t all button up again once he leaves office, will chaos remain the norm in fashion? Will dressing like Bill Evans become the next form of subversion, like it was in 2011, or will we still dare to wear chartreuse corduroy suits with striped shirts and sneakers as a statement against what was — and is right now?
History repeats itself, and right now American culture, both stylistically and politically, has a similar essence as it did in 1969. A polarizing, demagogic president, racial animosity, and a freeform approach to dressing mark our moment. It’s almost as if society has taken three steps back after two big leaps forward. Our reflexes respond in the same way as they did 50 years ago, and our fight or flight mechanisms affect our fashion choices as well. We either rebel with what we wear, or we use it as escapism. Some people still experiment for experimentation’s sake, but the most politically sensitive among us cannot do so. We may even adopt the enemy’s uniform as a tactic of subversion, for the only way we can infiltrate them is if we look like them. Living with the internet, where we can access information about and images of almost any past fashion and subculture, it’s easier to play dress-up and transport ourselves to a different era than it was when individualism was last in fashion in fashion.
Noah’s F/W19 lookbook.
Brands like Noah are doing a great job channeling individualism in our post subculture era. They rip up a classic one — prep, in their case — and turn its remnants into a critique against exclusion. Their F/W19 lookbook is entitled “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” and the photos feature models — black, white, male, female — recontextualizing classic American style. The styling is all pathos: Rugby shirts with “Most Precious Blood” embroidered on the back, patchwork and paisley pants paired with Weejun loafers, rubber boots emblazoned with a skull and crossbones. While many of Noah’s pieces are too logo-heavy for my own wardrobe, I nonetheless love what they’re doing, encouraging an anarchic, inclusive mode of dressing using clothes that once excluded. Moreover, these pieces are combined in a way that renders type irrelevant. America, as a melting pot, has finally become one in terms of style. We can now wear Western shirts under blazers, or with boat shoes and beat-to-hell pants. We need not lament the rules of style that guided us or the instruction that images of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Cary Grant provided after men were mired in the early aughts mess of baggy pants and going-out shirts.
On his blog, Die, Workwear!, Derek Guy recently wrote, “I no longer think that everyone should spend a lot of money to buy quality, or that classic men’s style is the only way to build a wardrobe. I don’t think everyone should own a button-down shirt or pair of raw denim jeans. Style is so personal and expressive, which is what makes it interesting as a subject.” No longer are we part of a tribe, but on our own journeys. Not islands, but peninsulas, jutting off of something bigger while sticking out like a not-so-sore thumb. No longer do we need instruction, but rather we can use what we’ve learned and destroy it, reinventing it in the hopes of creating something out of fashion, something our own that draws from the past, is rooted in the present, and looks toward the future.