Every morning, you ask the same question, “What the hell am I going to wear?”
You can put on your Supreme BOGO or new Palace T-shirt, but then you might look like a total fuccboi. You can try one of those long T-shirts that look like they’ve been wasting away in the Sahara Desert for years, but then you’ll just look like you can’t think further than a picture of Kanye West. You just bought the $400 Vetements DHL T-shirt, but you’d rather be dead than a fashion victim. You love Nike and adidas sportswear, but hate the word athleisure. Your dad caps are more played out than normcore. You think about a flannel that’s stuffed in the back of your drawer before remembering that thing you read about Lumbersexuals that one time.
You imagine the horrors of loading up the timeline only to find #influencers roasting your fit. You're eventually identified as the one behind “the worst alphet” meme in blog posts that read like obituaries. A vision of trolls appearing from behind bushes to ether your soul and self-confidence with a whatarethoooose haunts your dreams.
You find it impossible to calculate an outfit that will result in something that everyone hasn’t already scrolled past on Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram. There’s a bucket for everything nowadays. “You're always wearing some sort of starter pack,” Mary H.K. Choi, who has written for The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and Allure and is the host of "Hey, Cool Job," a podcast available on iTunes about—yes—cool jobs, tells Complex.
Complex’s Field to the Modern Day Fuccboi reads like the law used to convict those with a trash outfit. There are 10 different archetypes in that post alone, all staring you in the face, daring you to put something, anything, on. Your heart feels for the commenter who wrote, “So basically, every male who dresses any which way but the way you apparently do is a ‘Fuccboi’?” Should you reach out? "We can be fuccbois together," you think.
“Where it gets tricky is if you're young and relevant enough to understand that the types exist. Then, it's that phenomenon where you can meme that type,” Choi says. “Those people actually get got the most.”
Then, there are the rules. You could aggregate a list longer and more confounding than the net of hashtags beneath your 'Gram based on all the dos and don’ts offered by those who cover the fashion industry. You know these rules like scripture. You’d say you know these rules like the back of your hand, but the back of your hand is covered by the extra-long sleeves of your Vetements tee. You could risk it, and break a rule. But you've watched enough reruns of Law and Order: SVU to know that nothing good comes from rule breaking. Maybe you could just barricade yourself in an infallible fortress of grey T-shirts and hope to slink through the day unnoticed.
Where did it get so hard? You read up on the brands and trends that were promised to be next, cool, the best, and only invested in the surefire hits. You endured the horrible breaking-in period of denim that was, of course, selvedge and raw. You only bought joggers that cuffed at the ankles, because #NTDenim may as well be a war crime. This ‘90s trend should be a breeze because you grew up then and have the Beanie Baby collection to prove it, dammit. You only trade in jawnz. Roshes went straight in the trash, because donating them just would have been cruel, like trying to off the stumps of muffins, Elaine Benes-style. And, yes, it really is Ralph, tho.
But then, in a quiet moment, you think about the people who aren’t like you. Those poor souls who don’t wake up and scour the timeline, only to go to sleep with images of their next potential purchase burned on the back of their eyelids. “If you genuinely are a complete sad sack without taste, [the Internet] can be very useful,” Choi says. “There are little things—like, even your most Guy in Middle America, who watches network television, even that guy won't wear the most bootcut dad jeans anymore, with the whiskering and all that stuff."
Sure, for that guy the Internet is probably great. The Internet is the equalizer. “You do have an archive of every single possible resource of other trends,” Choi says. And this source of infinite information is what gives the guy in the suburbs the ability to post a fit pic that would get you picked up by Waste Management inside city lines.
But once you cross over from "sad sack" to the "young and relevant," the internet makes things more complicated. Young and relevant: It You. The Internet encourages you to dress like these archetypes, because it's safe. Putting on a bomber, an extended tee, a dad cap, and some distressed jeans is the closest you can get to wearing a security blanket. “Once you dress like almost a stock character type that you admire…that feels very empowering, and you feel very confident, and you’re fashioning for the first time," Choi explains.
But then, you’re also back at square one—trying to avoid dressing like a stereotype. The impossible question: What the hell are you going to wear? Blame the Internet for the strain. “There was a time when you either got fashion or you didn't get fashion, and not getting fashion is a luxury that people just aren't afforded anymore,” Choi says. You blame Zara. You blame Kanye effing West.
Until you give up. Because when there’s nowhere else to go, the only place you can go is forward. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. So you just put on whatever you want to wear. And you’re happy.
