CHOICE CUTS: THE FRESHEST THOUGHTSON MENSWEARIN THE PRESS
“The Male Waist Comes Back Into View” by Alexander Fury From T, The New York Style Magazine, March 19, 2018
For her spring men’s wear collection, Miuccia Prada cinched jumpsuits at the midriff and tucked jackets into highrise (and twice-belted) waistbands. Rick Owens sliced his pants even higher - g randpa-high - so that they pinched right under the ribcage, and Dior Homme showed a jacket that emulated the exaggerated, hipjutting form of the brand’s famous Bar silhouette for women, which Christian Dior introduced in 1947. Nipped waists have long represented femininity incarnate (…) What does it say about the contemporary man that variations on the theme are now in for him? At Dior, the fact that a signature piece can so easily transgress the gender divide speaks to the value of heritage. A lot of things manage to do that nowadays, true, but the male waist trend only
seems l ike another step toward neutered androgyny. This is not a look that erases sex, but rather emphasizes it. A Barbie doll’s waist comes to a near V; so does Action Man’s, an ideal propagated in Ancient Greece and revived in the ninetenth century (when men wore their own corsets). And so the silhouette hints at a d ifferent kind of gender fluidity altogether, one based on the notion that the shapes defining the hyper-masculine and the überfeminine are remarkably similar.
“Oh God, Are We Really Dressing Like Ali G?” by Emilia Petrarca From The Cut, April 6, 2018
Last Friday, a new fashion meme started going around the internet. It depicted Ali G - t he early-2000s alter-ego of actor Sacha Baron Cohen - dressed in his signature getup: a yellow tracksuit, a d iamond chain, tinted sunglasses, and a Tommy Hilfiger skull cap. “How all girls in NY dress now,” read the image’s caption, written by Chris Mendez. Mendez is a copywriter for a l iving, so he knows how to hit a nerve – or a ‘mood’, if we’re speaking internet here. His meme has been retweeted over 2,000 times, with almost five times as many l ikes. And that’s just on Twitter. I’ve also seen the meme shared across Instagram(...) My initial reaction was ‘Really’? But after an Instagram deep dive, I realized that there’s definitely some truth to this trend. The character of Ali G was born in 2000 as a parody of the stereotypical British white guy who imitates hiphop culture. He spoke in a sort of fake Jamaican patois, used catchphrases like ‘ booyakasha’ and ‘respek’, and dressed in tracksuits, big chains, and white sneakers. At the time, his look was meant to be ridiculous: a sporty, oversized aesthetic borrowed from rappers five years earlier, dialed up to an absurd level by someone who was clearly out of touch. These days, the tracksuit-and-trainers look is back, filtered through a lens of nostalgia and worn not just by New York girls but everyone from Armie Hammer to Kendall Jenner.
“Robert Mueller, Style Icon” by Troy Patterson From The New Yorker, March 7, 2018
When the Washington Post ran a dual profile of Donald Trump and Robert Mueller, (the former FBI.director and the special counsel who is leading the Russia investigation, Editor’s Note) the paper took care to note Mueller’s daily wardrobe when he was the director of the F.B.I.: “a traditional J. Edgar Hoover-era G-man uniform: dark suit, red or blue tie and white shirt - always white.” A consideration of Mueller’s clothes has become a commonplace of both written narratives and TV chitchat about him. In the absence of leaks from the special counsel’s office, the public is left to listen to the clothes, which are equally reticent, which is their elegance. Assembled from a narrow palette of Establishment standards, Mueller’s regular outfit communicates a moral outlook in its particulars, an unostentatious grace in its polish. One of the pleasanter aberrations of the Trump era is the emergence of Robert Swan Mueller III, the owner of a modest rotation of discreetly striped Brooks Brothers suits, as a fashion icon. (…) In his emphasis on telegraphing rectitude, it is tempting to see the influence of Mueller’s tenure in the Marines. (…) He is armored in the good, clean, honest look of an extremely civil servant, unaffected and, therefore, inimitable.
“The Co-Conspirators: Authenticity and Agency Panic” by Rob Horning From Vestoj Magazine n° 8
Since the 20th century, it can seem that some form of anti-fashion - where people claim to be above or against fashion frivolity and in favour of a timeless or purely functional styles - is always coming back into fashion. Recently, according to an article by Jason Chen at The Cut, this has taken the form of ‘gorpcore’, wearing no-nonsense outdoor wear l ike windbreakers, fleece, and puffy vests. A few years before, it manifested as ‘normcore’, which embraced khakis, plain T-shirts, and other suburban mall staples. Before that the tech CEO proclivity for standard uniforms (Steve Jobs’s black turtleneck; Mark Zuckerberg’s grey T-shirt) conveyed an above-it-all approach to dressing oneself, suggesting that one is so focused on visionary entrepreneurship that there is no time or mental energy to spare on thinking about what to wear. When such trends emerge, they are powered by the pretense that they are not part of fashion’s ordinary churn but somehow signal a unilateral ability to transcend social dynamics. But when this gestures attract notice - when magazine writers take them up - they are assimilated into those dynamics, and actually serve as the fuel for them. All antifashion is ultimately leadingedge fashion. (…) Both fashion and antifashion are integrated into the fashion industry; they merely cater to different and often simultaneous consumer fantasies.