Maybe the idea of advice as being central to forum-culture comes from a gap in menswear overall – for women, fashion advice is drilled into us through everything from magazines like Glamour and Grazia to E!’s Fashion Police. Wear this, do your hair like that, look sexy etc. For guys who want to look dapper in a suit, where do you go to learn about the nuts and bolts of dressing well, the cut and cuffs and tailors and labels?
And so much of the menswear industry is tied up in ideas of masculinity: workwear, for instance, has long been appropriated by city-dwellers in an ironic link to a time where men worked with their hands, when they made things. Then there’s the notion that a man is not a man until he buys (or is bought) his first suit, a notion struggling to survive in an age where fewer men than ever actually need to wear a suit in real life. Forum culture makes room for all this, and its hierarchies and mores allow guys who know more to impart their knowledge (and their snark) to guys who still need to learn.
Womenswear online doesn’t have as much of this. For the most part we have a complex blizzard of competing personal fashion blogs which are now almost entirely geared towards money, and the remaining fashion internet: a home for the female obsessives, in long-running forums-slash-reference-libraries like the Fashion Spot and the Purse Forum. There is a subreddit for Female Fashion Advice, too, but it’s a world away from its male equivalent, emphasising instead the how-tos of everyday dressing in the acceptable, mainstream way of simply not looking like a dope.
Men’s forum culture is proof of what happens when you take much of popular media out of the fashion continuum. By allowing guys to shape the fundamentals of how to dress well a little more freely than us girls get to, forum culture has reshaped fashion in the image of what real people want – a focus on quality and timelessness over trends and bargains, a reverence for longstanding houses alongside new, independent brands trying to break out and an insistence on expertise above all else, the personal adherence to a set of rules and codes that add up to make a guy stylish without going overboard.
Menswear will always baffle me slightly. Despite writing and learning about fashion for a living for some time now, I still can’t speak with confidence about most of its tropes and foibles. But what I did learn from my time lurking the forums is this one nugget of wisdom, and I will leave you with it to save you the time: Keep your suit buttoned. No man worth his post count spends money on a well-fitting suit only to leave it unbuttoned. It just wouldn’t be sprezzy.
