Within the mass of trends that make up the multi-headed beast we call menswear, the word “peak” acts like a sort of black spot. Most famously we had “peak beard”, which described the moment the Brian Blessed look began its long, slow descent from cool to uncool. But there have been many salvoes against other trends, some of them launched from these very pages and all with the word “peak” on the payload.
To date, however, nobody has had the bottle to call time on all men's fashion. Until now.
Earlier this month The New Yorker did just that by asking if we have now reached “peak menswear” - or #menswear as it calls it, in reference to a Tumblr hashtag created in 2010 to which many thousands of images have since been appended.
About half of these seem to be pictures of either Steve McQueen or Paul Newman. Most of the rest are of good-looking young guys in tweed jackets, rolled up chinos and those pointy shoes which, as Liam Gallagher once noted, “come at you like a snooker cue”.
Dig deep (by which I mean scroll way, way down) and you will catch sight of a model in green leather shorts or a collection of Manchester City away tops from the mid-1990s or a naked man in a Bugs Bunny head. But the fact that you do have to dig deep/scroll way, way down to find these diverse flavours proves one of the points being made by The New Yorker: that, for many of us, menswear is actually quite samey and uniform. Rather than teaching us how to cultivate a sense of personal style, it has taught us instead to obsess about “heritage” textiles and “classic” brands and to raid the historical dressing-up box in search of an identity rather than going out and creating one for ourselves.
“Walk into a menswear boutique and you’ll find yourself asking questions like: do I prefer Cary Grant or Sean Connery?” the magazine writes. “Today, a man’s outfit is likely to suggest that he’d be happier if he were anywhere other than where he is – sailing off Nantucket, say, JFK-style, instead of working in an office in 2015”.
So when did we actually reach the moment of peak menswear? It could have been earlier in the autumn when Antonio Banderas enrolled as a fashion student at London art school Central Saint Martins and gave an interview in which he said it was his aim to bring back the cape. That's right, the cape.
“I think they have incredible possibilities,” he said. “They’re very comfortable. And especially nowadays every place has heating, and it’s not like in the old days when inside was almost as cold as outside, so people had to be properly layered. Now, in winter time, you could just wrap yourself up in a cape, it’s so easy!”
So easy and so not going to happen. Frankly I'm pleased, though: I'm still hoping to see ruffs, codpieces and tricorn hats in Top Man before the bell finally sounds for last orders in the menswear saloon.
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