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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.
I want to highlight a couple of points that you made related specifically to the phrase “clothes that fit”
The fashion business is a bit of a disaster because you have no way of telling if that 35 inch waist is really 35 inches or anywhere between 32-42 inches. I have three shirts from three different brands, one is Medium, the other Large and one extra large, yet they all fit, and are not baggy. It’s gotten to the point that I use an online fashion site to try and figure out what actual size I should get from different brands. It’s a headache.
The rise of fast fashion means it’s harder to find brands with good stitching and with good materials. Yet all most people want is to look ‘nice’ and have clothes that last. That is partly why the fashion business is lost, they are a victim of their own success with fast fashion. People don’t want (unless they are really rich) to keep buying clothes all the time but they still want to look smart. It shouldn’t be that hard to achieve.
Couldn’t disagree with any thing you said.
Excellent article that surfaces the ways we assert agency as consumers and how we may be deprived of it. Tying insidious ways technology creeps into and subverts human experience or expression, except that instead of McQueen, a real live human being, capable of authentic, original creativity and emotion, it is now a bot telling us what we should feel and desire.
One could extend Lessig’s observation and argue that, with agency AI spreading everywhere, there is no longer a human in read/write and perhaps consume. Agentic AI will simply parse the feed and order one’s clothes making humans passive consumers and losing agency, again. It’s only too easy for humans to place too much stock in machines as the Eliza experiment showed.
Thank you for challenging the prevailing narrative.
I guarantee you this would not happen because fashion and art are still last options for self experimentation and expression. If it does, then I failed at the point of this piece.
“The clothes are the vocabulary. I write the sentence.”
Love this sentiment. It puts fashion in the proper place without throwing out the entire concept as a superficial one (it’s definitely not). A pleasure to read, as always!
Thank you Amanda. I have often struggled with fashion as been frivolous label. None of that. I have enjoyed being fashionably and stylish.
Fantastic read, thank you. It reminded me of a quote I read somewhere, saying something like “being stylish is not about wearing fashionable clothes; it’s about making the clothes you chose to wear fashionable”.
Fashion is fleeting, there hasn’t been a new trend in decades. It’s all a cycle with color stories and fits now. I was Creative at Levi’s in the nineties when there was slim, relaxed, loose, baggy, etc., but the consumers who bought 501’s knew they never went out of style.
Japan has clung to baggy and boxy all this time for their street look. There’s been other trends, and they were in, then out. I still look to Beam for what’s happening there. Levi’s Vintage goods sell better in other countries.
My last year at Levi’s I watched the last family member retire, then read the news that production moved offshore and all the US factories shuttered. Cone Mills, the maker of Levi’s best denim for the US shuttered. The 30″ and 60″ looms were sold and someone else is trying to fill the void. Levi’s has also had several CEOs who didn’t value the quality, or made in the US production, and have bastardized the product standards. I stopped following what was going on.
I half expect them to end up with private equity firms latching on and squeezing out the last drops of indigo dye and driving them into the ground. They went public decades ago then later bought back the stock. That was smart. But that is lost on the board members these days I suspect.
Levi’s never drove the fashion bus, they were fortunate to ‘own’ the original and authentic tagline. That’s meaningless without a flagship product that still represents that. They had their moments with Silver Tab in the early 90’s with a fashion forward ad campaign that was stellar. 501s had a generous ad budget then too.
When I was working there, kids in focus groups (I despise focus groups, smart product and marketing turned to crap because of kids who had no clue) made comments like “looks like the jeans my dad wears.” That was not a compliment.
I imagine it’s gotten a lot worse. The product has. I learned the 22 points of inspection done with every pair of 501s back in the day. It no longer applies. Even the leather-like waistband patch art is no longer original or authentic. I remastered that waistband patch art for Red Tab jeans only to watch it disappear not long after I left.
My point is consumers don’t really care. They’ve become trained monkeys and are reliant on social media for what to wear. Influencers, even stylists, aren’t the big talent they used to be. They are in the business of competing for clicks, not being original. I still watch all the high end designer runway shows and most is art fart dreck. It’s a show, it’s not what retailers are going to sell, or could sell. The true cognoscente are suffocating with the wet blanket of wannabes promoting crap from whoever will pay them.
I suspect there will be a corporation forming at some point that offers social media influence services and it will be the end of creativity and exploration in the garment world, and maybe everywhere else. Corporate fashion, or AI fashion, is not that hard to imagine. The couture maisons will be the last hold out for real original design. The rich are getting richer, so there might be a future there. What that means for the masses will be interesting to watch.
I’ve been buying classic clothes for decades and taking care of them and will wear them as long as I can get out of bed and dress myself. I went to prep school and wore Shetland sweaters, Oxford cloth button downs, corduroy, khaki, tweed, white pocket tees, and 501s all my life. I collect vintage Shetland and Norwegian sweaters, LL Bean Chamois shirts and outerwear, Brooks Brothers fine gauge knits, and quality cashmere. I grew up in NH and ME and dress comfortably, and am well prepared for cold weather.
As the old Levi’s tagline said, “Quality never goes out of style.” It’s arguable today.
I am sure the consumers are trained monkeys but even monkeys have their own minds and industry is finding out that for once the monkeys don’t need any more training. They are evolving.
As for Levi’s they were coveted for not how often they changed, but how little they changed. Fashion icons are all the same. Timeless and the elegant. As for Beams, sadly they are too mainstream and commercial and unimaginative these days.
I liked the idea of us moving from an era of “designer is the author and we are the readers” to one where “clothes are the vocabulary. I write the sentence”. I have always valued fashion as an avenue of self-expression. I think its value may be increasing in today’s distracted times. You may not read my long blog post, engage with my portfolio of images, or listen to my 3.5 minutes track without skipping; but you will see me and my fashion across the hallway or even a Zoom screen.
The dirty secret is that most of these fashion editors are automatons, beholden to advertisers. It’s not that they lack a POV, it’s that they are put in the penalty box for expressing any POV that goes against the prevailing narrative or the biggest advertisers (sometimes, both at the same time). They can’ t speak their mind because, if they did, they’d likely be out of a job. Over time, they become a husk of themselves. Still traveling to fashion weeks just to nod their heads and sing along “yes, this is great, we all agree.”
There are only a few “critics” left. Caramanica (and he’s not really fashion), Flaccavento, Givhan, Vreeland and Trebay (sometimes, and only because he’s too eccentric to count out).
Everyone else? Into the longtail of Tiktok “influencers”…?
Mid. All of them.
Nailed it Brian. The whole system is a compromise
Great article, full of thought-provoking insights and perspectives. In terms of clothing I am the least fashionable person on the planet, but I took a lot away from this because the phenomenon extends further than clothing.
Love the write-read-write observation: ‘influence’ as a virus…
Loved this perspective. It reminds me that true style isn’t about following trends—it’s about wearing what you choose with enough confidence and personality that it becomes fashionable.
This essay hits on an actual cultural phenomenon. Instead of looking to designers for inspiration, as they always have, many consumers now view fashion through a curatorial perspective. But “nice clothes” can become a conformity of their own.
Instead of conforming to the loud streetwear aesthetic, people might be conforming to a minimal aesthetic in which everyone wears beige and neutral tones.
In other words, the issue isn’t really whether the clothes are “loud” or not.
The issue is whether or not you have chosen your own fashion.
As such, the essay ends on the perfect note:
“The question wasn’t whether the clothes had a point of view. The question was whether you did.”
Thank you for enjoying the reason why I wrote this piece!
It really made my day
This resonates with the traditional fashion statement floating around. For many years, the company has believed in the tools that flow from weavers to buyers. But in an international saturated with pix, references, and private curation, it means that the number of streams increases the other way. “Nice” clothes are not constant evidence of a recent decline – they could be evidence that humans have emerged as less interested in borrowing identities from brands and curious as well as positioning themselves en masse. The most exciting thing is not neutral pants or matching blouses; The shadow that connects them. Fashion media constantly ask why clothes lack an attitudinal aspect, while customers quietly ask why clothes would want one when they have already given their private
And I think with Ai the self expression will become much more part of the human experience and effort.
Brilliantly said, Om.
“The clothes are the vocabulary. I write the sentence.” perfectly captures our cultural shift. What looks like a preference for simplicity is actually a reclaiming of authorship. By moving away from logos and trend-driven fashion, people are no longer letting brands tell their stories—they’re curating their own.
A neutral palette isn’t conformity; it’s a blank canvas that puts individuality back at the center. As culture moves from Read-Only to Read-Write, personal agency quietly triumphs over the gatekeepers.
Thank you for articulating it so beautifully.