Past the spaghettied highway on-ramps and lines of idling cars. Past the dookie brown river, overhung with trees shaking in the am cold, like you or I shake during a pee shiver in the am cold. Past the most expensive yogurt shop for 50 miles, a Shaws, you see signs for the Wrentham Premium Outlets. This was Black Friday weekend, 2007. I was sitting on a bench made from recycled materials, waiting for my mom to get the fuck out of Anne Taylor Loft when two of her contemporaries, looking very proud of their handbags, walked out past me. One asked the other, "Wait, you don't think he'll like this blazer?" Her cohort replied, "I don't know. Probably not. But it's not like we dress for men, anyway." An arrow of starlings fired from a trashcan, french fries in their dumb beaks, when it struck me like a Sudden Clarity Clarence: Women dress to impress other women? This. Changes. Everything.
I was in my late teens—peak years for your brain going a'splodey—and had assumed girls dressed to impress us, the same way we wore "going out" shirts to school dances to impress them so they'd let us do something we could lie about later. But nah. Because they knew something then that we didn't. That their fashion sense was parsecs ahead of ours and we couldn't tell the difference between culottes and candy necklaces. So, being hardwired to look their best, girls looked to the only people both in their age bracket and on their level for style validation, other girls. And with a head start like that it's no wonder they've stayed the path.
But it seems like in the last, I don't know, four or five years, girls dressing for other girls went from a trade secret to common knowledge. If you haven't yet, do check out Man Repeller for examples of going beyond dressing for other women and dressing to actively repulse guys. Granted, many of the looks are fuego, so, BACKFIRE!
Right, so, that happened and continues to happen. And men continued to dress to impress women because girls care allllll abooouuuut stuff like cloootthhhhes and men don't, right?
Ha, no. I know who the fuck I'm talking to on this website.
You're dressing to outdo the crew, to make a fraud of the squad, to crush brunch, to catch daps after photog street style snaps.
With the rise of #menswear, dudes began dressing to impress, well, other dudes. You know it, even if you only just realized you knew it. This is a post-GQ, post-Esquire phenomenon, in that those pubs were where guys turned for a bridge between the devil-may-care clothing selection of their youth and the sophisticated, put together vibes they wanna beam out in adulthood. But again, this is very much to attract similarly sophisticated, adult women. But recent #Menswear is embracing the buckwild silhouette, the poopy ninja, the clothes get weirder corner of men's fashion that, in my experience, has a lot of women wondering who the fuck raised us.
I don't know about you, but I'm almost guaranteed not to get any phone numbers in Whole Foods when I'm wearing my aboriginal sneakers and fishtail teepee. But catch me around the four or five guys I know in North Carolina who care about clothes and they'll be like, "YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, FAM."
I'll concede that North Carolina and New York City are totally different fashion realms. And maybe you guys have places you can go where the fairer sex is just as up on the latest as you are. But you're not dressing for them. You're dressing to outdo the crew, to make a fraud of the squad, to crush brunch, to catch daps after photog street style snaps. Wait, I think there's actually caffeine in this green tea.
And there's nothing wrong with that! If we promise to acknowledge it now, never speak about it again and still vow to work a sensible Oxford shirt into the rtoation. Because the quickest way I know for #menswear bros to die out is by becoming so fucking alien no women will want to reproduce with them.
Rick Morrison is a writer living in North Carolina. Follow him on Twitter here.
