Clothes for Chic Dudes and Unhinged Moods

We Tried on the Best of the FW23 Menswear Collections, Straight off the Runway

For lack of better words, the menswear runway shows and presentations this January had weird vibes. With two of luxury’s biggest jobs vacant, designers and show-goers alike were coiled in a state of unease. Gossip, idle speculation, and the oncoming deep freeze of a recession dominated the ambience—not to mention that the weather itself was totally frigid. A FW23 menswear collection presentation was not a time to let your hair down, let alone stick your neck out, which made any good ideas one happened to see feel even more courageous.The decade since I started caring about men’s fashion shows can be defined by two eras: the era when everyone talked about streetwear becoming a thing, and the era when everyone talked about streetwear's imminent demise. FW23 seemed to mark a new epoch, one where the fashion cognoscenti was too concerned with hiring, firing, and other chaotic unknowns to philosophize about the revolutionary power of graphic hoodies. To borrow a term from Steff Yotka’s trend report about the month, these queasy times have “spaghettified” our understanding of men and how to dress them, stretching the mundane into new and complex forms. Among the hullabaloo, these were some of my favorite outfits.

The ever-elusive “tailoring comeback” has become a central messianic concept in menswear lore. Every season these words are screamed into the sky like a rain chant, and every season the tailoring does not come back, leaving droves of dudes to slog forth in their cardigans and straight-leg jeans. As one of the rare, well-documented suitsmen in my age demo, let me tell you, the key to incorporating tailoring into real life is to make it easy. Get a black suit with a good fit, find the right black shoes, throw on whatever you want as a top (a pressed shirt, a thin sweater, a ski thermal, anything), and voila, you look like you’re ready to buy a Rothko or direct the next addition to the Criterion Collection.No brand today more steadfastly upholds the mantle of Tailoring Realism than The Row. Its burgeoning menswear label derives its chic from effortlessness, which manifested this season in the form of generously pleated slacks and slouchy blazers with a low-slung center of gravity. During a season when many designers offered their spin on the double-breasted suit, plucked straight from everyone's ’90s Armani moodboard, The Row ran circles around the competition.

I am a shameless fan of what I call Jonathan Anderson’s “Milan Era,” named for the two consecutive menswear seasons in which the designer crash-landed his eponymous label into the mostly conservative Milan Fashion Week calendar and proceeded to bewilder the public. Anderson’s FW23 effort was bombastically headlined by its frog clogs (a nod to fellow British shit-starter Prince Harry) and general pantslessness, but what I enjoyed most about the show was its leather booties, brought to life by Anderson’s right-hand cobbler, ABRA’s Abraham Ortuño. Taking their form from certified bondage gear—not in a performative gimp mask way, but in an authentic, weirdly practical way—the footwear encapsulates Anderson’s unique penchant for taking menswear into new terrain. Not only does he go there, but he makes you want to follow.

Gucci’s long-awaited return to Milan—the brand hadn’t done a menswear show there since the arrival of COVID in January 2020—was made even more uncanny by the absence of its longtime creative leader Alessandro Michele. And while the show lacked twin armies, prosthetic heads, and other Michelian theatrics, it conjured cool clothes befit for a certified mangénue (a word I just invented for "male ingénue"). What I enjoyed most about this collection was how real it felt. The FW23 Gucci man might not be hosting a bacchanal in a space-age castle like Guccites of collections past, but he is very believably sipping an iced matcha with his agent at Brentwood Country Mart. Take this rockabilly number with its bedazzled skinny jeans and nonexistent tank top—no commentary about existence here, just a well-made outfit designed for the highly fuckable among us. In this sense, it reminds me of someone whose name rhythms with Bomb Chord.

The FW23 runway season marked the gestation of a theory I’ve been brewing called hypernichifcation. The theory posits that after a decade of Mass Luxury (more or less “streetwear,” but other things too), consumers now want designers to take them somewhere specific, unique, and unapproachable. Popularity and accessibility are out, tribalism and peculiarity are in. And with enough buy-in in the form of rabid loyalty, something niche can exert more gravitational force than pure follower count and transcend into something much more potent. Hyperniche brands only stick to their script, and as a result their devotees await their collections breathlessly. Hyperniche brands don’t sell garments, they offer an all-encompassing 360 aesthetic. They lead cults.Across the board, FW23 was a triumph for hypernichified brands. Bode delivered a remarkably Bode-like collection staged in the even-more-Bode-like setting of a reconstructed Cape Cod summer home. Kiko Kostadinov, Junya Watanabe, and Wales Bonner delivered tailoring-heavy collections that left superfans buzzing up their sales reps to reserve full looks. Relative Kenzo newcomer Nigo put forward a highly remixed, neo-Western revelry that officially turned the 53-year-old brand into another chapter of his personality cult. But no one does hyperniche quite like Rick Owens, a designer so talented at world-building that his quarterly presentations feel like boarding an ark into another reality. Rick Heads really show up for a Rick show, be they Law Roach, Bloody Osiris, or Erykah Badu. They wear their Rick and bend the knee at Rick’s altar, and when they are worthy, Rick gives them more Rick.A highly underestimated source of Rick Owens’s hyperniche power is the craftsmanship. His garments speak volumes in a way that easily allows the beholder to pour oneself into them. Take this cape that was sent down the FW23 menswear runway, with its thousands of matte black sequins undergirded by a thick layer of boiled wool. Have you ever worn a 20-pound cape? Or any garment so armored that it feels like it could repel a bow-and-arrow strike? Have you ever seen a matte sequin? These types of specificities brew the alchemy of the hyperniche experience, and are what make this item a veritable museum relic for the weirdo who buys it.

Dries Van Noten is another designer in the hyperniche pantheon. For good reason: His menswear is endlessly engrossing, and if you’re going to be a dude who’s into silks, you might as well make that a lifestyle. What I enjoy most about latter-day Dries is his penchant for unexpectedly breaking character and delivering bangers. This is how a fashion cult grows. Last year, it was those flowy summer separates that were clocked on the likes of LeBron James, a look that almost any man of style can wear and, as a result, become forever Dries-pilled. FW23’s Dries gateway drug comes in the form of a smattering of basketball mesh tops and bottoms that wink to another GOAT with an oversized “23” print. The items occupy a rare zone: garments that feel just as natural in one of Justin Bieber’s scumbro papp pics as they do paired with the new-romantic hourglass silhouette of this wool coat.

My final lesson in the phenomenon of hypernichification came in the form of LỰU ĐẠN, a brand unabashedly devoted to the mission of celebrating the badass Asian dudes that occupy designer Hung La’s inner circle. When designers make clothes for a community rather than an imaginary public, it unlocks a virtuous circle in which your customer is also your muse, and vice versa. Hanging with Hung and his crew in real life feels like stepping into one of the brand’s neo-noir lookbooks. Taking inspiration from Wong Kar-wai protagonists, B-movie villains, and video game heroes, LỰU ĐẠN’s clothing lives in a terrain between reality and fiction. You can look like a final boss by shirtlessly rocking one of its leather sets (like our model Ruben does here) just as easily as you can don its martial arts pants to the bodega (as I do every weekend).

Allow me to end this recap where it started: with deliciously effortless tailoring for men of impeccable taste. As someone who has spent many fashion weeks ambulance-chasing big headlines, I’ve never made the always chic, always quiet Lemaire appointment viewing. This season, however, it was the only thing some people were talking about. One editor compared the experience of watching Lemaire’s layered ensembles gliding down the runway to “popping a Vicodin.” The magnetic genius of something like this brown outfit lies in its combination of sophistication and wearability. The overcoat can be thrown over anything and retain a shoulder structure that cuts an elegant frame and hangs poetically from the body. The nearly structureless suit—often a pet peeve of mine—has a slight goldenrod sheen that allows the fabric to dance rather than look soupy. It’s the kind of outfit that restores one’s faith in menswear.