I Don't Care About Trends and Neither Should You |
Why you should skip the manufactured hype and focus on honing your personal style instead. |
The photo that inspired this newsletter. // Photo by Daniel Z. Baraka |
As Esquire's fashion team lurches towards another season of fashion shows in Florence, Milan, and Paris, I once again raise a flag to my favorite new year's resolution (and the only one I have any intention of fulfilling): staying the hell away from fashion trends. I was struck a few days ago by a shot posted on Instagram of a headless chap (it turned out to be one @danielzbaraka) in a beautiful tweedy Balmacaan overcoat with more than a whiff of vintage Ralph Lauren about it. But that's not what struck me. What got me was the quilted green nylon liner peeking from underneath the coat. As someone who has spent far too long sifting through vintage stores for old military clothing, I knew right away what it was. Those wavy quilting lines gave it away as the button-in cold-weather lining from the classic M-65 field jacket, one of the most ubiquitous pieces of functional clothing ever made and a well-known fave of military hounds. But you don't usually see it in the context of an expensively tailored coat. A few clicks later and one is on its way to me now via eBay for a cost of $27 plus postage. I don't know Daniel, but from his feed its clear he has a deft and informed way of throwing things together. His style is cool and—crucially—trend-free. And I like that. |
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| Daniel rocking a red duffle coat. // Photo by Daniel Z. Baraka |
Trends these days are reserved for people who don't know how to dress. Maybe it's my age, but trends used to mean something in men's fashion, keeping those of us who cared vaguely up to date. But they were subtle and they evolved in big, gradual cycles. They certainly didn't rule your life. Today, you can't escape them. The desperate appetite of digital content providers for trotting out anything that could be declared trending right now (meaning it might just last until lunchtime) is not for grown ass men. One-leg jeans? Supersized overcoats with ironing board shoulders that could house a family of four? This is fashion as performance, as entertainment. Looking downright silly, I'm fairly convinced, has nothing to contribute to dressing well. |
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| Friend of Esquire Max Poglia in an N-1 deck jacket. // Photo by Lorenzo Sodi |
It's fine, of course, to keep a weather eye on fashion. No one wants to be a dinosaur, after all. Except maybe the man we at Esquire like to call "2012 man," who still spiritedly wears too-tight Italian tailoring and pointy, dog-shit-brown dress shoes, blissfully unaware that the entire world has moved on. As a young writer it was my job to look for trends, to find a thread of consensus amongst big-ticket designers on the runways of Paris, Milan, London, and New York. I'll admit that sleuthing out where things were (maybe) headed was thrilling stuff. The joke was all you needed was two of anything to call it a trend. One, the thinking went, was a direction. Two was a trend. But three was a tsunami. I never came home without a tsunami of tsunamis. I'm not ashamed to admit, either, that I fully embraced trends back then. But being on a restricted budget, I had to get savvy. It meant mixing spendier pieces with thrift-store buys and vintage. And it has stayed pretty much that way ever since, so there's just as much of a thrill at unwrapping a musty bit of vintage as there is in carting home a swanky designer shopping bag. The clothes with which we have the longest and best relationships are the ones in which we have invested not only money but thought, time, and effort, too. |
Another Esquire friend, Robert Spangle, looking decidedly un-trendy. // Photo by Robert Spangle |
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Clothes, fundamentally, are like food. We'd certainly not get very far without either. Like clothes, when it comes to food, you can blow your salary every night on expensive meals in swanky, hot-this-week restaurants and, while reveling in the undoubted skill of the chef, you can revel in your own switched-on-ness. Or you can fill up on cheap take-out. Or, if you're savvy, you can teach yourself to prepare and master one dish after another, amaze your friends with your culinary dexterity, and save a bunch of money in the process. Dressing is a creative act, and all the more so if you can develop a knack for throwing things together and make them your own (even if it means borrowing the idea from someone on Instagram). Sure, you can't very well make all your own clothes. But how you source your clothes and how you put them together is every bit as creative and essential as cooking a great meal. So this year—and the next, and the next—skip the trends and focus instead on a steady diet of real, personal style. It's much better for you. |
Thanks for reading this week's Big Black Book newsletter. See you in a couple weeks. Until then, feel free to drop me a note at nicksullivanesquire@hearst.com. - Nick Sullivan, creative director |
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