Interesting article, though I disagree with some points and we can certainly restart the authenticity debate now . But it's nice that StyleZeitgeist's influence on menswear is finally acknowledged in a mainstream media source.
Cultural Comment
CULTURAL COMMENT
NOVEMBER 12, 2015
It’s Raining Menswear
BY JOSHUA ROTHMAN
"Earlier this fall, Antonio Banderas, a.k.a. Zorro, began taking classes in menswear design at Central Saint Martins, the renowned London fashion school. In an interview with the school’s student newspaper, Banderas explained that he wanted to start his own menswear line; his particular ambition was to bring back the cape. Capes for men, he said, have “incredible possibilities”:
There are all these varieties of capes. For example, in the time of Charles the Third in Spain, capes were an instrument to kill—and to cover yourself. People used to do this [makes Zorro move] and nobody would know who you were. So they used to cut the capes and do these short capes, because it was forbidden by the law to wear long capes at night.… In Spain there are still places where there are clubs of people who love to wear capes. The shape has almost the same shape as the capote for bullfighting, in beautiful pink silk, with yellow or blue in the back.
“For me, it’s actually easier than a coat,” he concluded. “You walk into a place and you just BOOM! throw it off.”
How plausible is it that, a few years from now, men on the streets of New York will be wearing capes designed by Antonio Banderas? The answer is “very”; it’s easy to name the combination of factors—heritage marketing, “Game of Thrones,” Kanye—that could make it happen. It takes only a little imagination to propose that, during the Great Cape Revival of 2019, capotes will be worn with sneakers and tights as a way of giving the fading “athleisure” trend (hoodies, T-shirts, sweatpants) a little seventeenth-century swagger. This won’t seem strange; instead, it will be an evolutionary development from the Great Poncho Revival of 2016.
These days, although ordinary men still dress in ordinary ways, “menswear”—the Internet-centric, metropolitan, yuppie style—keeps getting riskier. Hardcore menswear enthusiasts have found themselves dressing in costume-like clothes; although they look great in their tweedy sport coats and pocket squares, asymmetrical hoodies and slim-cut jogging pants, and military jackets layered over other, lighter military jackets, they also look like they’re in town for a menswear-themed Comic-Con. Faced with these examples, I’ve found myself taking stock of the movement that has, for the past decade, more or less covertly reshaped the way men dress. Have we reached peak menswear?
If one had to pick the date on or about which men’s clothing changed, October, 2010, could be a sensible choice. That’s when The Hairpin published an article, by Mary H. K. Choi, called “All Dudes Learned How to Dress and It Sucks.” “There must have been some clandestine colloquium workshop situation where all the dudes in all the land shucked to skivvies and got sized for their perfect pair of Uniqlo jeans and nobody said ‘no homo,’ not even one time,” Choi wrote. The upside of this change was that, all of a sudden, men on the subway looked “SO GODDAMN GOOD”; the downside was that it was now impossible to guess anything about a man from his clothes. “I have ZERO idea what dude is who right now,” Choi concluded.
There wasn’t, unfortunately, a clandestine colloquium, but there was “menswear,” a conversation that began online, in the early aughts, largely on Internet forums devoted to men’s fashion. Each forum catered to a slightly different kind of man. On Ask Andy About Clothes, old prepsters—“trads”—talked about sack suits; on Superfuture, kids who wanted to look like Tetsuo, from “Akira,” compared the fades on their Japanese denim. Users on Styleforum obsessed over heritage and craft, discussing labels like Incotex, Brioni, Filson, and Schott, while StyleZeitgeist was more avant-garde, with an emphasis on Rick Owens.
CONTINUE
Cultural Comment
CULTURAL COMMENT
NOVEMBER 12, 2015
It’s Raining Menswear
BY JOSHUA ROTHMAN
"Earlier this fall, Antonio Banderas, a.k.a. Zorro, began taking classes in menswear design at Central Saint Martins, the renowned London fashion school. In an interview with the school’s student newspaper, Banderas explained that he wanted to start his own menswear line; his particular ambition was to bring back the cape. Capes for men, he said, have “incredible possibilities”:
There are all these varieties of capes. For example, in the time of Charles the Third in Spain, capes were an instrument to kill—and to cover yourself. People used to do this [makes Zorro move] and nobody would know who you were. So they used to cut the capes and do these short capes, because it was forbidden by the law to wear long capes at night.… In Spain there are still places where there are clubs of people who love to wear capes. The shape has almost the same shape as the capote for bullfighting, in beautiful pink silk, with yellow or blue in the back.
“For me, it’s actually easier than a coat,” he concluded. “You walk into a place and you just BOOM! throw it off.”
How plausible is it that, a few years from now, men on the streets of New York will be wearing capes designed by Antonio Banderas? The answer is “very”; it’s easy to name the combination of factors—heritage marketing, “Game of Thrones,” Kanye—that could make it happen. It takes only a little imagination to propose that, during the Great Cape Revival of 2019, capotes will be worn with sneakers and tights as a way of giving the fading “athleisure” trend (hoodies, T-shirts, sweatpants) a little seventeenth-century swagger. This won’t seem strange; instead, it will be an evolutionary development from the Great Poncho Revival of 2016.
These days, although ordinary men still dress in ordinary ways, “menswear”—the Internet-centric, metropolitan, yuppie style—keeps getting riskier. Hardcore menswear enthusiasts have found themselves dressing in costume-like clothes; although they look great in their tweedy sport coats and pocket squares, asymmetrical hoodies and slim-cut jogging pants, and military jackets layered over other, lighter military jackets, they also look like they’re in town for a menswear-themed Comic-Con. Faced with these examples, I’ve found myself taking stock of the movement that has, for the past decade, more or less covertly reshaped the way men dress. Have we reached peak menswear?
If one had to pick the date on or about which men’s clothing changed, October, 2010, could be a sensible choice. That’s when The Hairpin published an article, by Mary H. K. Choi, called “All Dudes Learned How to Dress and It Sucks.” “There must have been some clandestine colloquium workshop situation where all the dudes in all the land shucked to skivvies and got sized for their perfect pair of Uniqlo jeans and nobody said ‘no homo,’ not even one time,” Choi wrote. The upside of this change was that, all of a sudden, men on the subway looked “SO GODDAMN GOOD”; the downside was that it was now impossible to guess anything about a man from his clothes. “I have ZERO idea what dude is who right now,” Choi concluded.
There wasn’t, unfortunately, a clandestine colloquium, but there was “menswear,” a conversation that began online, in the early aughts, largely on Internet forums devoted to men’s fashion. Each forum catered to a slightly different kind of man. On Ask Andy About Clothes, old prepsters—“trads”—talked about sack suits; on Superfuture, kids who wanted to look like Tetsuo, from “Akira,” compared the fades on their Japanese denim. Users on Styleforum obsessed over heritage and craft, discussing labels like Incotex, Brioni, Filson, and Schott, while StyleZeitgeist was more avant-garde, with an emphasis on Rick Owens.
CONTINUE
Comment