Peak lapels are a formal detail, so they're best kept to formal clothes. In the first photo, we can see Gary Cooper wearing a sport coat, which sits slightly below suits in formality. This one is among the more casual variants: a rough woolen tweed made with triple patch pockets, a three-roll-two closure, and swelled edges. Given the cloth and details, it requires a notch lapel. Notch lapels derive from garments that were historically designed to be buttoned up to the neck. In fact, if you take your suit jacket today and flip up both lapels, you'll notice that they'll form almost a Maoist band collar. Men historically wore their jackets this way on cold days, mostly for informal everyday activities and country pursuits. In the second photo, Gary Cooper can be seen wearing a much more formal ensemble: a dark chalk-stripe, double-breasted flannel suit with a welted out-breast pocket and likely flapped or jetted pockets at the hips. This is something that men historically wore while doing business in the city. Given the formality of this outfit, it requires a peak lapel. Peak lapels derive from frock coats, long, fitted garments worn by members of the upper-class during the turn of the 20th century. Bankers and lawyers wore frock coats; clerks and administrators wore lounge suits. Hence why we get this formal/ informal coding today. This characterization is not always so cut and dry. To me, a double-breasted jacket should have peak lapels or, if the garment is meant to look a bit relaxed, a shawl collar (as it derives from smoking jackets). Thus, in the third slide, we see a brown linen double-breasted suit — informal cloth and color — but with peak lapels. Whereas Cooper's triple-patch-pocket tweed would look odd with peak lapels, this design looks totally at home here because of the double-breasted closure. To me, asking whether you should get peak lapels requires a conversation. When will you be wearing this garment? Afternoon or evening? Summer or winter? What are the occasions? Business or parties? What other details does this garment have? What is the cloth, pocket style, closure configuration, number of buttons on the cuff, edge treatment, etc.? A thoughtful choice has to come together as a harmonious whole. The garment has to suit the time, place, and occasion; the details have to work in concert. I would only warn people about getting a single-breasted peak lapel suit. While this is standard on dinner suits (aka tuxedos), sometimes they can look strange in other fabrics. On a double-breasted jacket, the long line on a peak lapel can look very elegant, like a sweeping shark fin. But on a single-breasted jacket, it can look truncated, like the stubby legs on a Thanksgiving turkey. If you get a single-breasted peak lapel, ask the tailor for examples of what they've done before. There are more ways a single-breasted peak lapel can go wrong than a single-breasted notch design or a double-breasted peak. Most men should shop off-the-rack from reputable clothiers, who will decide which lapel style is best for which kind of garment. Men who are using custom tailors should seek out tailors who are good and lean on them for advice. If a tailor is good, they can advise you on whether a peak lapel is suitable for the kind of garment you want. If a tailor is not good, you have bigger problems than the lapel style.

Black dress shirts have become oddly popular in the last decade, but most men would do well to avoid them. It's not because they're verboten, but because they require a trained eye to style well. And most men don't have the eye for it. Black dress shirts were historically the mark of the lower working classes, often the type to patronize or own seedy nightclubs. This doesn't necessarily make them bad, but it does help us contextualize their meaning. For much of the 20th century, men wore dress shirts in white or light blue — or combinations thereof — partly because White Anglo-Saxon Protestants defined respectable culture, and that's what they wore. So by wearing a black dress shirt, you were either defying these rules or signaling that you had no interest in partaking in them. We see this kind of character in this scene from Goodfellas, which I've attached in the first slide. This is what gives the style its allure, much like how black leather motorcycle jackets hold a certain mystique. However, to wear this look well, you have to know how to style it. For instance, Ben Shapiro in the second slide is wearing a light gray sport coat with a black dress shirt and black pants. The sport coat has relatively soft, narrow shoulders and thin lapels. The cut of the jacket and color combinations are all wrong. Overall, the style looks more low-rent than rakish. This is the sort of outfit you see on prom DJs or cruise ship magicians, not louche nightclub habitués. In the third slide, the style is pulled off a little better. The lapel has a bit more verve; the jacket is slightly fuller, with an extended shoulder line. The trousers are high-waisted with double pleats. The overall effect is very convincing — more cool lounge lizard than maître d' of a restaurant that serves $20 spaghetti. So yes, black dress shirts allow you to forgo a tie, but the chances of you looking good in a black dress shirt are very low, at least if you're wearing a tailored jacket. If you're in a suit or sport coat and want to wear a black base layer, you are safer with a black turtleneck or knitted polo (something made from a finer knit than a pique cotton), as you see in the final slide. This shifts the shirt away from "I bought this at Express."

I don't think I'm doing a good job communicating my view, so I will try to do better in this post. My view is shaped by over 15 years of writing about fashion (including the effects of fast fashion), reading @wdavidmarx's book "Status and Culture," and private conversations with technologist @quintendf. I will incorporate each of these influences as I make my argument. Let's put AI aside for now and talk about fashion, where I have better footing. We can start with a basic question: why were slim-fit pants considered good in the early 2000s, but bad today? The simple answer is because fashion moves through a lifecycle. In the early 2000s, wearing slim-fit pants signaled that you were on the edge of culture. Perhaps you bucked gender norms, read Details Magazine, and drew inspiration from youthful European fashions. After all, this was a time when designers like Hedi Slimane and Raf Simons sent ectomorphic models marching down the runway in skin-tight clothes. And nands like The Strokes and The Libertines gave the style cultural relevance. Over time, the meaning of that look changed as it spread through the market. In the early 2000s, skin-tight pants looked cool because they signaled gender rebellion and rock-and-roll. But as it got mainstreamed through Mad Men and J. Crew, it became increasingly normalized and sanitized. Today, it represents the opposite of what it did in the early 2000s — gender conformity, out of touch, corporate drone. Also whatever Andrew Tate represents. This is the basic dynamic that drives fashion forward: people with low cultural capital copy people with high cultural capital, and then people with high cultural capital move on to distinguish themselves. This dynamic has been observed and remarked upon for hundreds of years, including by Bernard Mandeville (1714), Georg Simmel (1902), and Pierre Bourdieu (1979). This is why we're seeing a swing back towards baggier pants. People who put a lot of effort into improving their cultural capital don't want to look like everyday office drones, political interns, or Andrew Tate. Although, many astute fashion writers have remarked on a backlash to the backlash. Prada recently sent models back on the runway in slim-fit pants, probably because every male fashion influencer on Instagram nowadays is wearing the same look (e.g., cropped top, big pants, 70s hairstyle). Now let's look at the fast fashion industry. Fast fashion isn't bad just because the clothing is low quality. It's bad because it speeds up the trend cycle. In the distant past (say, pre-20th century), styles used to last at least a generation, if not more, because production was slow and information moved slowly across geography. Over the 20th century, as fashion went from bespoke to ready-to-wear, the production cycle sped up. By the end of the century, a look would still last maybe a decade before it got old. Today, developments in information technology and supply chain management have made it possible for a company to rip a look off the runway and put it into their stores before the original designer even has a chance to monetize their creation. So the criticism of companies like Shein, Zara, and H&M isn't just that they make crappy clothes (which they do), but that the minute you buy something, you realize the trend is already over. The people you tried to copy have already moved on, so you have to copy the next thing. Plus, as this copying process accelerates, designs can get more jumbled and ugly. Oh, double riders and fleece are trending? Let's make fleece double riders. It doesn't matter if it looks like ass — the thing won't stick around in the market long anyway. In his book Status and Culture, @wdavidmarx talks about how people's pursuit of status moves culture forward. Much of the book draws from varoius fields, such as sociology, anthropology, media studies, and the like. But then the last part of the book deals with something curious: Why can various fashions define previous decades, but things have not changed much since the 1990s? Indeed, I would argue that the last big innovation in menswear happened in the 1980s/ 90s with Japanese designers like Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Mikaye. Menswear has been backwards looking every since — never forward. Every era in the past had a distinct fashion. The 1960s had Mods and the Peacock Revolution, the 1970s had hippies and bohemian dress, the 1980s had power suits and the return of prep. Yet, if you watch a 1990s episode of Friends ... we kind of still dress the same. Yes, the silhouettes have changed a little, but the styles are mostly identical. Marx suggests this is because status games mostly play out online, where cool things can become uncool in a matter of hours. As a result, nothing really takes hold, so we get fleeting fads instead of era-defining trends. Think of what happens with memes. Something starts funny, and then a corporation's social account uses it to seem relevant. Then the meme is decidedly uncool. I once had a conversation with @quintendf about this. He suggested that we might be approaching a period where creative people seek to do things off the internet. Maybe that means returning to zines and cassette tapes that are passed around through a dub of a dub. Or maybe it's sensory experiences you can only have in person. During our conversation, I said that for this to happen, we need affordable housing in densely populated areas so creative people can interact with each other offline. And not feel pressured to maximize their income by selling themselves online. Which brings us back to AI. That Yung Lean video originally went viral because people found it moving. I remember reposting it on Twitter, which led several people to question whether I was secretly paid behind the scenes to do so (I wasn't, as I don't do paid tweets). To me, their questioning only underscores how natural that viral moment was—the video moved lots of people, so they shared it on their socials. Now that it has been endlessly copied in such trite, meaningless ways, the visual effect feels ever hollower. It has become a meme. As one person put it, "I now cringe when I see it." If we look back on history, we can see distinct creative movements in art, music, furniture design, fashion, architecture, and more. Neoclassicism led to Romanticism; Art Deco eventually led to mid-century modernism; big-band swing music led to bebop. These movements all follow a familiar formula: a zeitgeist led to a backlash, which created yet another zeitgeist. How can we have a creative zeitgeist when nothing is allowed to take hold? When every visual language is so easily replicated through AI tools and turned into memes? When visual language speeds from cool to cliché and then gets used by people with low cultural capital? This is what I meant when I said that AI may contribute to our cultural stagnation. The issue isn't whether AI detracts from the original work. Indeed, it can elevate the original artist and bring them more attention. The question is whether this is good for people who care about creative integrity for its own sake — outside of notions of monetary rewards or fame. And whether this is good for culture.

No, I don't think so. I think Conor McGregor's tailoring is best understood in the context of how labor has been deskilled for almost 200 years. Let me explain. Before the mid-19th century, most men who were not manual laborers wore bespoke clothes. In other words, their clothes were made specifically for them, typically by women working in the home or by bespoke tailors. This is how the King of Spain gets his clothes. When he was 11 years old, his father brought him to see a bespoke tailor in Madrid named Jaime Gallo. Gallo made the King's clothes using traditional methods: he measured the King's body and then used those measurements to draft a paper pattern from scratch. This pattern, which serves as the garment's architectural blueprint, is used to mark and cut the cloth. The pieces are then roughly basted together into a wearable fitting garment. When the King tries on this garment, the tailor takes notes on what needs to be changed, deconstructs the garment, and makes the necessary adjustment. This process repeats three times — basted, forward, and final fitting — with each step bringing the garment to its final form. This is partly why the King's clothes fit so beautifully: they were made by a skilled tailor and refined through multiple fittings. More important, however, is Gallo's technical skill. To be sure, not all tailors are so skilled, which is why I don't recommend going to just any random tailor. Gallo continued making clothes for the King until his own death in 2015. In the first slide, you can see three photos: two of the King wearing Gallo's tailoring at different periods of his life, and a meeting desk at Sastreria Jaime Gallo (Gallo's workshop). Most people today don't wear bespoke clothes. Instead, they wear ready-made clothes produced by manufacturers and sold by brands and retailers. The shrunken silhouette we see today was principally shaped in the early 2000s by three designers: Raf Simons, Hedi Slimane, and Thom Browne. These men were not rebelling against classic tailoring, which has not been culturally relevant since the late 1960s. Instead, they were rebelling against the oversized tailoring of the '80s and '90s, which was also created by designers (such as Armani). In the 2012 documentary "Antifashion," Simons explains that he felt oversized silhouettes were "too American" and "macho" (think Arnold Schwarzenegger). He wanted something that felt younger, more European, and made for thin, effete bodies. Slimane echoed this sentiment in a separate interview, saying that he felt bullied as a teen for not being very muscular, so he intentionally wanted to design things that felt more androgynous. He rejected the idea that every man needed to feel big and macho. Whatever you want to say about the shrunken suit trend, there were no technical issues with the original versions. Along the top row of the second slide, you can see two suits by Slimane and Browne. Notice that there's no puckering or pulling. The collar hugs the neck. I also think the clothes look pretty good on the models. This is largely because there are still people with technical knowledge working at this stage. The problems arise once those designs slide further away from such people. On the bottom row of the second slide, we can see Lionel Messi wearing a Thom Browne suit. IMO, it doesn't fit him as well as the model above him because he's a more muscular build. The original slim suits work best on thin figures with shoulders broader than the hips. Once you put these clothes on different figures, they can look egg-shaped. This mismatch can happen for all sorts of reasons. The people involved in selling or styling clothes today often lack technical skills: editors, writers, stylists, salespeople, marketers, and such. The designer was already one step removed from the tailor (a technical person), but at least they can work with a pattern maker (another technical person). Many people today are another step removed from that technical layer. Conor McGregor's clothes are from his own line, August McGregor, which he created with David August. Although David August works in custom clothing, he's not a tailor. He measures clients and sends those measurements to an overseas factory, where garments are produced by people who never meet the wearer. Conor's role is simply to market the product. He's a built-in influencer for the brand. There was a recent Wall Street Journal article about the emergence of "muscle suits," which is to say, very bulky guys wearing slim-fit tailoring. IMO, this can only emerge from the history we talked about. As more people lack technical skills and more layers or barriers exist between them and people with technical skills, the garment can look more distorted or strange. On the final slide, we see a video from Brimble and Clark, an custom tailoring company mentioned in the WSJ article. Like those from August McGregor, these are made-to-measure clothes produced in distant factories, though they use more stretch blends. Someone once told me that the owner of Brimble and Clark holds a ceremony when he delivers a suit to you. When you come into the shop to pick up your suit, a painting is mechanically lowered to reveal a collection of tiny knives. The company owner takes one of the tiny knives, sews it behind your lapel, and then ceremoniously puts the jacket on you. Then it's time for your own private photoshoot, where you get to pose around Chesterfield field couches while wearing your jacket concealing a tiny knife. The purpose, of course, is simply to make the wearer feel good. The business person understands something important: how a customer feels is more important than whether the product is good. This is essentially the system we have today. The company owner, salesperson, fitter, customer, writer, and influencer often possess little technical knowledge. The remaining expertise is concentrated among pattern makers and garment workers at the very end of the supply chain. I think about this sometimes when I read about AI, as I think it represents yet another step towards the deskilling of labor. Perhaps one day, someone who knows how to draw with pen and paper will look at an AI-generated image and recognize certain distortions that many have come to accept. But AI is outside my area of expertise, so I'll leave that discussion to others.

You can see here why most men don't wear it. Without a jacket, the material can almost be indecent (although it's more forgiving in non-white colors like light blue). For this reason, some tailors double up the front, like you see on the right, but this limits the breathability.

Personally, not a fan of those ties either. They read very Vineyard Vines or Hermes. For people who have not yet developed a taste in ties, here are some failsafe options that will always be considered in good taste. — Rep stripes: These ties were historically used in Britain to denote belonging to an organization, school, or club. So if your school colors were brown and navy, then you would have a matte silk tie with diagonal brown and navy stripes. Over time, these just became general designs, which means unless they are designated as club ties, you are probably safe to wear them, regardless of membership. Choose designs that are not overly busy. To me, these are the most versatile ties, as they can be worn with suits or sport coats. — Macclesfield foulards: For much of the 20th century, the best silks were printed in Macclesfield, England, where the surfaces were sometimes decorated with small, repeating geometrics, which some in the menswear industry called "foulards." These can include small florets, diamonds, squares, dots, or mini-paisleys. Again, unimpeachable in terms of taste. I think they look better with suits than sport coats, as the slightly smaller scale pattern reads as more formal. — Grenadine: Grenadine is a slightly textured silk fabric made in Italy. It has a honeycomb structure, which can vary in scale depending on the maker's choices. If you can only own one tie, make it a grenadine in a solid color such as navy, black, or dark brown. In a solid color, the tie adds visual interest to plainer outfits by lending texture, while its simple color allows it to be paired with patterned shirts or jackets without clashing. — Black silk knit tie: Most men today don't have to wear neckwear regularly. They may only need to wear one for certain occasions, such as weddings, funerals, and court appearances. Thus, if you want a tie you can wear on a more regular basis, such as dressy social occasions, consider a black silk knit tie. It's the most casual form of neckwear and will never be mistaken for a business tie. Black, in this case, is a surprisingly useful and chic, given the casual design. Of course, there are ways to branch out, such as choosing Shantung for summer and ancient madder for fall. As well as nuances about make (three-fold vs. seven-fold, unlined versus lined, tipped vs. untipped, etc). However, such details are too complex for Twitter, which favors simple information. So if you have not yet developed a personal sense of taste in ties, you can rely on the limited options above to know that you will certainly look good. As a general rule of thumb, choose dark, sober colors, such as navy, chocolate brown, burgundy, and forest green. You should also opt for matte fabrics, nothing too shiny, like satin.

great essay and incredible photos. what a stylish time

RIP Sonny Rollins, a great jazz talent and the last surviving musician in one of the best photos of men in suits during the 20th century

i disagree. the original bond had refined taste. tate's various wardrobe choices — here, a striped charcoal suit jacket with navy worsted trousers, business clothes with no socks — are clumsy and reveal a lack of understanding of what he's wearing.

When I was on a menswear forum, navy trousers were of great controversy. Discussions about them lasted many years, resulting in long-lasting rivalries. Sometimes people refrained from speaking about them out of fear of dredging up old debates. Here's a thread on navy pants 🧵