"You can’t tell how cool anyone is or how rich anyone is or what anyone reads."

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.

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.

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.

Men’s fashion, rather than opening new doors for identities to try on, has instead become the defining identity, as Benny demonstrated.

It’s telling that the people who wear menswear the best right now are, like, Ayo Edibiri and Chinatown grandpas.

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.

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.

Menswear, in its current iteration, is so painfully, tragically, white boy coded.

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.

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…