In Menswear, Boys Will Be Boys — But Not How You Think

In their liberation from strictly gendered fashions, designers recently have found a way to have fun with traditional mens- and womenswear’s tropes that is both experimental and deeply nostalgic. Gals are wearing boxy The Godfather-like ensembles while guys don glittery laces and bustle’d shorts — the codes of gendered dressing have long not been this present or subversive.

Even in true-to-sex form, Fashion month’s best garments read as so comically indebted to convention, they’re more conceptual or counter-cultural even than plain conservative: girly girls and hyper-mascs mingled amidst the more fluid, bending hoards of outfits, on runways by everyone from Gucci to Saint Laurent and Jean Paul Gaultier.

For the real-life male wardrobe, these developments are manifesting not just in individual items, but in the layered combinations of them: the tie that once belonged to an ’80s playbook’s power suit now sits beneath a roughed up leather pilot jacket; technical outerwear is suddenly paired with an evening-style shirt or silky scarf, and so on. It’s dashes of JFK Jr. athleisure, sprinkled with that creative dude’s messy bomber and a corporate clerk’s penchant for business-y classics.

But anyhow, to keep this more show, less tell, we took to Ssense’s plethora of product to prove our point: the manliest of today’s menswear looks best juxtaposed to camp-y proportions. Below, find some inspiration.

Boys Will Be Boys — But Not How You Think

The Other Kind of Officewear

Think, instead: a crisp, tailored shirt, an arrow-straight tie, and a… clasp jacket? That’s right. Swap the banker’s blazer for the firefighter’s go-to coat, and land on an getup that tilts masculinity on its head without actually forfeiting any.

Staples, Reworked

Here, the logic is simpler: keep the capsule goods, but combine them to remove predictability.
A leather biker jacket brings structure and weight, whereas a fine-gauge v-neck keeps the silhouette sharp, soft and close to the body. The denim shirt conjoins the jagged with the elegant, preventing fully formal or fully folksy. No dramatic contrasts, just a matter of balancing otherwise clashing elements.

Art-School Cool

The bomber here sets a tone that the slouchy knit beneath and a pleated scarf swiftly do away with. Nothing here fits, yet somehow it all kind of does, amounting to an eclectic jumble of once-recognizable references that, together, feel novel.

Material Maximalism

Similarly, what do a crisp poplin shirt, a fuzzy knit, a heavy suede, and a tie have in common? Nothing, really, but that’s the point. These vastly different textures and shapes are so at home in the man’s closet, yet often far away from one another. Dare to marry them for ‘fits that breathe new life into familiar, flat-feeling staples.

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