The past decade has seen menswear rise from a blink-and-you-miss-it aside to a directional, scene-stealer category at the ready-to-wear shows. It should come as no surprise that next year’s Costume Institute exhibition and its accompanying Met Gala will focus on menswear for the first time since 2003. Menswear, after all, has become an industry anemometer: Its pendulum swings measure the speed of fashion and its direction.
It was indeed the suit, the perennial symbol of maleness, which took center stage at the most recent women’s shows: supersized à la Matthieu Blazy at Bottega Veneta or cut slim and cropped by the likes of Alessandro Michele at Valentino and Seán McGirr at McQueen; a tried and true classic at Ralph Lauren or paired with tiny shorts or flowy skirts. It’s still the suit that we go back to when we have an appetite for subversion or its flipside, discretion.
There was a sense of softness to the spring women’s collections, as eloquently put by my colleague Laird Borrelli-Persson in her trend report, but the accompanying men’s looks were stronger, with a focus on sex appeal. What do “hot” men wear today? It may be a trim double breasted navy jacket—see Lucky Blue Smith at Ralph—but more often this season it was thigh-baring running shorts of the kind seen at Coach, Our Legacy, Mugler, and pretty much everywhere else. You have Gladiator II star Paul Mescal, and his tiny running shorts, to thank for this emphasis on the thigh: It was the first Gladiator film, featuring a beefy, muscly, and musky-looking Russell Crowe that set the template for an übermasculine idea of the male form back in 2000. Fast forward a quarter century and the star of Ridley Scott’s epic sequel is at the locus of a revised—but not so much—new masculine ideal. Not to mention many designers’ moodboards (plenty of whom are gay men, it must be said).
Yet more tantalizing and beguiling than the upper thigh was the menswear emphasis on the hip and lower back. The budding designer Patricio Campillo turned this often ignored real estate into a new erogenous zone with cropped jackets and low-slung trousers, and it was Demna at Balenciaga who made happy trails the season’s statement with his lower-than-low low-rise jeans. What makes these looks sexy is the danger of catching a glimpse of something you shouldn’t be looking at. Other guys in Demna’s lineup wore tight, cropped polo shirts and tees in the style of the aughts-era boy-next-door ideal. The culture is now chasing the grown-up version of these men on the runways, and when the paparazzi run behind Mescal, Harry Styles, or Jacob Elordi.
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