#Menswear, a 600-Word History
If you look inside a dictionary (what the fuck is a dictionary???) you’ll find the definition of the word menswear to simply be, “clothes for men”, and that seems easy enough.
Conversely, if you look inside the Internet, you’ll notice the definition of the word menswear to be a bit more complicated, made only more-so by this thing (#).
Let’s take a step back, briefly, to the 90’s. The 1990’s were not only significant because of my birth; they were also largely controversial and super “What the hell, Kevin?” because of a phenomenon known as business casual.
Escorting business casual into the American workplace was the tres-Jimmy-Buffet attitude that what you wore on a day-to-day basis, especially to work, wasn’t that important, and that if anything, looking like shit only made you better at your job. (“How can I be expected to knock out all these TPS reports if my shirt sleeves are constricting my range of motion, Brenda?!”)
The magic and boner-inducing mystique of casual Fridays had finally come to envelope the entire week, and soon, a majority of the American workforce looked like this.
Viva la short-sleeved resistance!
Fast-forward to the Roaring 2000’s (as I’m sure they will later be called) and the introduction of street style blogs. In 2005, Scott Schuman began snapping pictures of stylish New Yorkers on the street, a la Bill Cunningham, and posting them on the Internet, not a la Bill Cunningham. It is also roughly around this time that Fashion (note the capital F, you fOoL) quickly became extremely popular, nearly to the point of cultural obsession. Shows like Project Runway and the prevalence of stores in the vein of Zara and H&M put clothes at the forefront of everyone’s attention, and out of the blue, gents (and some ladies too, although to a less severe extent) were noticing what they wore again. Bowties and suspenders and dandies, oh my! HOLY SHIT, EVERYONE WAS SO STYLISH! AND OUT OF NOWHERE!
I’ll take this opportunity to pump the breaks and acknowledge my oversimplification and historical inaccuracies, and offer my most sincere apologies to the large majority of my readership who are history buffs. It seems that the minute a hashtag is brought into the equation of the Wild World of Menswear, all manner of sin in what should simply be “clothes for men” is dutifully covered. When at one time blogs featured those with a genuine sense of personal style, they now also featured guys and gals dressed in a manner thought to be a textbook definition of stylish all for the sake of *hopefully* being photographed/liked/reblogged/OMG. It is, as another, much better, blogger said, total amateur hour.
Take for instance a basic Tumblr search for “#menswear”:
As George Takei would, in all his wisdom, say, “Oh, my!” (Though not in a good way.)
While clothes may now fit (slightly?) better, the people wearing them are not displaying any further personal style than their forefathers (RIP) of the 1990’s. When at one time the attitude was “not giving a shit in order to bang out TPS reports and immediately after bang out Brenda”, the prevailing one now seems to be “not giving a shit as long as you mimic exactly what you saw Tommy Ton snap, mixed with the shoes you saw mentioned on Man Repeller, like, three months ago”.
The Black Eyed Peas once asked, “Where is the love?” and right now, I’m like, “I don’t know.”
***On a wildly unrelated note, I am more than willing to accept a formal lesson in how to properly use parenthesis should anybody be more than willing to give one.