Words: Ana Kinsella
Fashion gets a hard time in a lot of popular culture. It’s derided so often as needlessly feminine, trivial, just some silly dresses on pretty girls. You’d forget, almost, that there are a lot of guys out there who take as much care and pride in what they wear and where they shop as their girlfriends do. Welcome to the world of men’s fashion forum culture, where fashion is a game to be played, with strict rules and codes to ensure that menswear is something to be obsessed over, with that same dogmatic fanaticism that you see when men get together and discuss, you know, sports or car parts.
I’m generalising wildly, here, but maybe you haven’t spent a lot of time lurking the likes of Styleforum or Ask Andy About Clothes or Reddit’s Male Fashion Advice. Men seem to have a capacity for engaging with fashion as somewhere between lifestyle and product that most women don’t. And each forum has its own idiosyncrasies and insider lingo, aiming itself at different kinds of men who want different things. Styleforum, for example, is divided into Men’s Clothing and Streetwear & Denim, two polar opposites straddling the world of fine tailoring and sportswear/workwear.
The common denominator across each of these forums? The asking-for and giving-of advice, from one man to another. A sample of current thread titles on Reddit’s Male Fashion Advice:
- What colour jumper/coat/outerwear do I wear with black jeans and tan suede loafers? How long can these jumpers be reasonably worn for? I’m getting addicted to mine :-/ (re: Christmas jumpers, and yes you have reached the expiry date)
- How can I dress like Kanye? pics/budget inside
- Cardigan came in the mail today, does it fit me ?
Depending on the individual forum, you may receive a normal, helpful answer in plain English, or else, on the other hand, you may be torn apart for your lack of knowledge in something that reads as a strange mix of hip-hop slang and skateboarding terminology. You have all encountered anonymous rudeness on the internet, I’m sure. So you can only imagine the cattiness of a group of men trying to one-up each other in their knowledge of notch lapels, double monks and what makes a man sprezzy. Concrete advice isn’t always the easiest thing to find.
