Clothes Are Nice. Fashion Biz, Not As Much!

Every morning I sit down and open Feedbin on my iPad. It aggregates my RSS feeds and newsletters – about a hundred sources – covering everything from AI to zeitgeist. One story stopped me recently. The Wall Street Journal proclaimed: “Menswear Is in Its ‘Nice’ Era.”

This comment from a personal stylist sent me down a rabbit hole about clothes, social media, and how the gatekeepers still don’t understand their own growing irrelevance:

“The clothes are inoffensive, but there’s no point of view. The downside isn’t bad taste, but the erosion of individuality.” – Turner Allen, personal stylist, New York

Menswear today is neutral tones, muted basics, everything well-cut and normal. Or as they say, nice. The Business of Fashion recently called this an epidemic. Everyone in the industry has an opinion about it. What almost nobody has is an explanation for why. The fashion media is smart enough to spot the symptom but fails at the diagnosis.

The BOF at least attempts an answer, channeling the music critic Simon Reynolds, who argued in his book Retromania that pop music had collapsed into endless pastiche – referencing references, with nothing original left to say. The same, the BOF writer suggests, has happened to fashion. The epidemic of nice clothes is what you get when an industry runs out of ideas.

Maybe. But that framing is still entirely about the industry. It leaves out the person standing in front of the mirror.

Me.

The writers’ complaints are simply the arrogance of insiders, something common across media. Just look at how self-referential the Atlantic and the New Yorker have become. Same when it comes to technology, sports, and everything else.

They all treat the paying customer as a rube. What if we stopped wanting the opinions of fashion insiders and sports reporters who are not nearly as honest as they pretend to be? Everyone is talking their own book, all the time, everywhere. Everyone is looking to get paid.

We the rubes have learned a thing or two.

For years we have been swimming in images. Instagram, street style blogs, TikTok, Pinterest, the endless scroll. Whatever you think of that flood of images, it has done something to our eyes. It has trained us. We have looked at more clothing combinations, more visual context than any generation before us. We have developed taste not from magazines but from sheer accumulated exposure.

The assumption buried in the insider complaint is that the point of view should come from the garment. That the designer is the author and we are the readers. That clothes arrive with meaning already assigned, and our job is to receive it correctly. This is how the whole enterprise of fashion writing has always worked – and it is, not incidentally, how affiliate link revenue works. You spot the trend and explain why it matters. You link to where they can buy it.

That model made sense when images were scarce and editors were gatekeepers. It makes far less sense now.

Look at my own closet. It is a capsule collection of about a hundred pieces. Plain, nice, comfortable, well-made garments. French-made bespoke blue shirts. Muji T-shirts. Japanese workwear. I arrived at each of them because they are precisely what they are not: a line item in LVMH’s annual profit report. They work with my body. When I combine them, the result is mine. Not defined by a runway, a trend, or any external verdict.

Alexander McQueen famously said: “I want you to come out either repulsed or exhilarated, as long as it’s an emotion. If you don’t feel an emotion, I’m not doing my job.” It is a great quote. It is also a completely designer-centric view of the world. The designer produces the feeling. You experience it. You are the audience.

That model is over. Today’s designers are mostly hired hands executing the commercial agenda of conglomerates whose job is to sell expensive product on installment plans to people who want to feel rich. The clothes that result are rarely worth the allegiance.

A perfectly cut neutral trouser means almost nothing by itself. But that trouser with a specific shoe, a worn jacket, a watch with some history, a shirt you found somewhere unexpected – now there is something. The clothes are the vocabulary. I write the sentence.

Compare this to what came before. The hypebeast era, the logomania, the streetwear machine – that was actually the most passive way to dress in living memory. The brand told everyone what you were about. The logo spoke. You just put the thing on. It was expensive ventriloquism.

The epidemic of nice clothes is not a failure of imagination in the industry. It might be the industry finally catching up to what people actually want: room to think for themselves. A canvas, not a lecture.

The question was never whether the clothes have a point of view. The question is whether you do.

Lawrence Lessig in 2008 argued that the 20th century had been a Read-Only culture. You consumed what the professionals produced, passively, with no mechanism to talk back. The phonograph, the radio, the CD: the machines made you an audience. The internet broke that. Suddenly culture was Read-Write. You could take what existed, layer it, reinterpret it, make something yours. That shift has expanded with every generational turn – Web 1.0, Web 2.0, social, mobile, and now AI.

Fashion just got there later. The hypebeast era was the last gasp of Read-Only dressing. What is happening now looks like an epidemic of nice clothes. It is actually the beginning of something else.

The read-write metaphor has since become read-write-read. And the data backs it up.

Hundreds of millions of people are not just consuming culture – they are recreating it. Layering it, putting it back out. The fashion industry’s complaint that people lack a point of view doesn’t hold against what the numbers actually show. These are the same people uploading 14 million tracks a month to SoundCloud and posting 272 TikToks a second. They have plenty of points of view. They just stopped waiting for permission to express themselves.

Now give me the raw energy of Diya Joukani – a self-taught designer from Mumbai who just filmed a cameo with Rihanna. Wintour is good for hosting the Met Gala, not for finding the new thing. She can’t. Because there isn’t one new thing anymore. And the fashion-industrial complex doesn’t understand that.

The upside of the connected world means now I can find a talent like Diya without any editor telling me that I must pay attention to her. And in her I see what I have always imagined, a world where we tell the story of us. Diya and I are about 35 years apart, but she captures how I see my clothes. A palette to be put together. Simple, nice, and authentic. Embellishing is what I do. Sure, I learned from Anna and her ilk. But now I know myself much better, and hence nice is not just nice. It is me.