When I became interested in clothes, I was not interested in clothes per se but interested in music. Anyone who grew up prior to, like, 2005 will know that, for a time, if you were interested in something — if you’re interested in sports or punk music or hip-hop or skating or whatever — there often came a kind of subcultural form of dress that you picked up almost intuitively. You wore a certain uniform to identify yourself as part of a group, but also adjusted that uniform a little bit to express that you were an individual within that group.

Like many young people, I went to clubs. I went to clubs to watch people dance, and they were almost entirely male affairs; 95 percent of the people in there were men who were also into dance. In that scene, there was a kind of subcultural form of dress. People wore Nautica, Tommy Hilfiger, Guess — and the most stylish of all wore Polo Ralph Lauren.

So I became interested in clothes by watching dancers and people in the music scene dress a certain way. Then when I went to Ralph Lauren, I was introduced to things like tweed sport coats and Oxford cloth button-downs and chambray shirts. It was only later that I realized that Ralph didn’t necessarily invent these things. Many of the original tweed sport coats came from Savile Row. The chambray shirts were originally workman’s shirts that were picked up by the US Navy. Brooks Brothers invented the original Oxford cloth button-down at the turn of the twentieth century.

So I kept digging and digging. By the early 2000s, I had discovered menswear blogs and forums. Through menswear forums, I fell in love with tailoring and all of these specific niche things, like rare Japanese jeans or whatever.

In the early days, for me it was all blogs. There were hobbyist blogs: you had interior design blogs, music blogs, style/fashion blogs. These were all run by one person — rarely it’d be, like, two people — and they would upload this very specific interest of theirs, and they’d have a blogroll on the side where they link to other blogs. And there was an online community oriented around that.

Like a lot of people, I was reading a lot of music blogs at the time, and people would do these deep dives into soul music or jazz music, and then they’d rip some record that they have into an audio file, and you got to hear some rare EP or whatever. But for menswear, there were the blogs, which was a one-directional interaction; this person was writing and you were reading, and sometimes there’d be some comments, but the comment section was kind of whatever.

The real “interaction,” was on forums, at least on menswear forums. I was primarily on Styleforum, but I was also a member of London Lounge and visited Ask Andy About Clothes and some other forums. Superfuture/superdenim was the one for denim. There were tons of forums for all these specific styles.

Looking back, part of it was there was a small cadre of core posters who knew a ton, and — at least on the forums that I visited — they were often not very friendly to “noobs,” or newbies. You’d go there and you’d ask a simple question, and people would seem exasperated that you would even talk. So you had to hang around for a while to learn all of this stuff. But the nice thing about menswear forums at the time was that all of the people on these forums were super nerds, and there were super nerds in the sense that they also not only had intense interest in the subject, but they came at it from different backgrounds.

There were guys who had been buying bespoke clothes from Savile Row since the 1970s. There was a professional bespoke tailor; there were professional shoemakers, cowboy boot makers. There was a guy who did pattern-making for one of the largest US suit brands. There were guys that just read tailoring books. There were guys that read 1930s menswear manuals. They came at it from so many different directions. That was so pre-internet. That made the discussion so interesting, because you’ve got all these different perspectives from these super nerds essentially.

Over time, in my experience, the forums started to shift a little bit, becoming a little more commercial. There’d be more affiliate threads; more of the people that were new would be coming in. They tended to both be primarily interested in shopping and consuming a lot of information from the same sources. It became very homogenous. If you read all of the blogs and forum content from 2005 to 2012, by 2012, the person that was coming in was mostly looking for shopping advice, and they were regurgitating something that had been written on a blog post in 2007, which you already saw. So it was less novel.

Another interesting thing about that time period — from 2005 to 2012, 2015-ish — was that bloggers were shunned. They were looked down upon, and they were considered both not serious and low status, so they wouldn’t be invited to fashion shows. Brands wouldn’t really associate with them. They were considered not very professional. And out of that came a lot of bad information, because the person was so outside the fashion system that sometimes they would just get things wrong. But you got the undiluted, unfiltered, honest opinion of somebody, even if it was wrong.

Over time, as fashion brands realized that blogs could generate sales, they brought them into the fold. They would give them free clothes; they would say, “If you help us sell things, we’ll give you some money”; they would invite them to parties. Of course, when you’re invited to parties, you feel special and you want to be nice to the brand. So you say nice things about them later.

Over time, the kind of purist view became a little bit more corrupted. If you looked at a menswear blog in, say, 2007, that [author] is a super nerd that is writing purely. Even in that one-directional exchange, where there’s very little interaction, at least you’re getting that super nerd’s opinion. And then by 2015, 2018, certainly today — there aren’t even blogs today. It’s all on Instagram now.

But these people would be invited to shows, they’d get free clothes and free sweaters, they’d get some kickbacks, and then it just became sponsored content. The thing that was great about blogs in the early days is that they were distinct from magazines, because many people felt that magazines had been co-opted by brands. In fact, nowadays bloggers are often worse than magazines because at least on some level — certainly if you’re writing for the Washington Post and New York Times — they enforce stricter standards. They don’t even allow you to take freebies. There’s some journalistic integrity.

Clothing choices are shaped on the moving tectonic plates of politics and economics as well as technology. The technology of the time influences what we can produce and how we dress but also the systems on which we build. Politics and economics define how we dress over time.

A good example of this is [provided by] looking at the political leaders over time, because they have the most choices in terms of dress. If you talk to a seventeenth-century peasant, they’re trying to fashion together whatever they can to cover themselves — although there were some sumptuary laws defining what people could wear depending on their station in society, which were still about protecting, to some degree, elite interests. But if you look at the elites at the time — if you look at English monarchs — many of them are wearing these incredible materials like pearls and gold. And they’re fashioning these clothes, using all of these systems of structure, to make themselves look almost otherworldly. The [goal] is to project the idea that this person is not of this earth, that they have some divine right to rule.

As you see democratic movements progress and people believing less in the divine right to rule, as the printing press takes off, as people reproduce printed material to criticize the ruling elites — you see many drawings making fun of how elites dress, to say that they are dressed ridiculously, that this kind of attire is unfit for someone who should be a steward of the country, and so on. But over time, the leaders of these countries in France and England started to dress more humbly. They were no longer wearing these kinds of incredible furs and silks and pearls. They started to dress a little bit more . . . not like the common person but a little more drab.

Beau Brummell had revolutionized men’s dress. Beau Brummell is a figure in Regency England who changed men’s dress by putting on what at the time was relatively simple attire for his station. Men who were interested in clothes were known as fops. They had these crazy powdered [wigs], and they wore this really elaborate clothing. Brummell pared it down to the simple navy coat, cream-colored breeches, and a very simple white cravat, which he actually spent a ton of time tying in the morning to get it to look just right, to give this idea that he didn’t necessarily actually care about his dress — that he just fell out of his bed and looked this way.

He’s often credited with changing men’s dress, which is true. The uniform that many men wear today, which is the navy sport coat and grey trousers and the white dress shirt and the cravat, which has become the necktie today, basically descends from Brummell. But Brummell was only able to do that at the time because there were already calls for more modest forms of dress. So when he advised King George, King George was open to the idea of Brummell’s view of fashion because there were pressures to dress a little bit more humbly, to focus on cut and restraint rather than going all out with this crazy clothing.

When you look at the changes in men’s attire over time, one story that I like to point to is the rise of the suit. Nowadays, when you talk about the suit, many people think of the suit as a very formal garment. It is basically the symbol of propriety and upper-classness. But there was something before the suit, and the thing before the suit was known as the frock coat, which was a much longer coat.

Men in high positions, such as those that occupied finance, medicine, and law, wore the more formal frock coat with a silk top hat, while people sitting lower on the professional and social ladder such as clerks, administrators, and working-class people wore a version of a garment known as the lounge suit. Most people, if they saw a photo of a lounge suit today, would say, “That’s a suit.” But it’s slightly different. It doesn’t look like what President [Donald] Trump or President [Joe] Biden wears today; it’s a little more of a rougher kind of utilitarian garment, but it is the baseline of how the suit came to be today.

It really took over throughout time because [some of the people] who saw their fortunes rise with industrial capitalism — the petit bourgeois, the clerks, the administrators — their clothes took on status and the upper elites, the people who were wearing the frock coats, were increasingly pressured to dress down. And they took on the new garment that had status, which was the suit. This also ties into religious beliefs to some degree, if you look at religious writings.

If you want to simplify it, that’s true. The suit also rose around the world because of the Second British Empire. You can track these changes; it’s easy when you look at the dress of other cultures before and after the rise of the Second British Empire, including dress in France, India, and China. All of these places became a little bit more drab because, one, the British Empire had enforced administration systems in some of these countries. So to work in the administration, you had to adopt a uniform; that was part of it. But also this kind of attire took on the idea of power and status.

There’s a really good writer, W. David Marx, who wrote the book Status and Culture in which he claims that almost all culture can be explained by status games, and that our pursuit of status is what drives culture. In that sense, you can understand that as the Second British Empire rose, more people adopted this kind of Victorian, drab British uniform. I will note that in Western culture, there’s long been a prejudice against dress. When you read Karl Marx’s writings, for example, he uses the term “fashion” as a pejorative. The story of the emperor who has no clothes is a story about a vain man who seeks flattery.

There has always been a bit of a bias against fashion in Western culture. It’s seen as vain and frivolous, fleeting. Historically, since women were pushed out of “serious” fields such as academia, politics, and law, fashion was left to women. Men were expected to have “higher” pursuits, and so they shunned fashion. In that context, Christianity specifically, there were these ideas. The Quakers, the Methodists, had this idea that to demonstrate moral and intellectual virtue, one should dress very modestly and humbly. And the more you rejected fashion, the more intellectual and morally virtuous you were.

When you understand that, the suit rose, one, because of the rise of the Second British Empire, as I mentioned. And two, because it was worn by what at the time was a version of the working class. It conveyed this idea of honesty and — kind of like how we see jeans today — this idea of ruggedness, masculinity, virtue, things like that. It also fit in very well with religious views on clothes, which is that you should dress more humbly. The suit was considered more drab and humble than the more formal frock coat. The frock coat, for example, had four panels at the back to give it this very shaped silhouette.

The suit, by contrast, is much simpler. It consists typically of just four panels: You have the two front panels that would cover your chest. That’s the part that you would button. And then, at the back, it’s typically two other panels. And generally speaking, the back is much straighter and less shapely than a frock coat. This was considered . . . I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was the cargo shorts, but it was, kind of, at the time.

To give an example, Keir Hardie, a founder of the British Labour Party, caused a great stir on his first day in parliament. He was elected to represent a working-class district of England, and he arrived to parliament wearing a tweed suit and [a deerstalker] cap. At the time, MPs wore the frock coat and a silk top hat. He wore that to signal his allegiance to the working-class constituents that he was elected to represent. The British press was scandalized.

It just demonstrates that what is formal and what is gentlemanly, in our understanding, was not always considered so. A proper gentleman of the 1800s would have considered the suit to be not proper, respectful garb, and would instead wear the silk top hat and frock coat.

Yeah, one takes much more work, craft, and expensive material to produce.

The production of clothing at the time was heavily on the back of slavery. And when we talk about the rise of the Second British Empire, we’re talking about colonialism, imperialism, guns. The history is undeniable. To answer the question of how people today grapple with it, I would say that tailoring — specifically the suit — is not just that history. There is that history, but there are also beautiful parts of that history, of how these clothes were worn and adapted and expressed by people of different classes.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently had their Met Gala, which raises funds for the museum’s Costume Institute. And from now until October, if you go to the Met’s Costume Institute, you’ll get to see their exhibition on the black dandy. If you can’t make it to the Met, you can buy the book Superfine, which is the book that accompanies the exhibition, or the book that inspired the exhibition, Slaves to Fashion by Monica Miller. Both are really great reads.

In Superfine specifically, you can see how black dandies took that language, just as you and I are using language right now, that was once used by slave owners. But they tweaked it, and they tweaked it so that it was still coherent — you still understand, “Oh, that’s Ralph Lauren, and Ralph Lauren represents wealth” — but they’re also using it in ways that represent their own identity.

When we talk about dandies, often we are talking about people like Oscar Wilde and Brummell and these great figures that loom over history and change the way men dress and the way we think about clothes. There’s a new book coming out this September by Peter Anderson, called The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendor. The great thing about this book is that it takes the idea of dandyism away from these famous aristocratic figures and talks about it in the context of everyday people — like the Congolese sapeurs in postwar France, who had used attire to define their own identity in the wake of what happened after World War II. The book talks about the black dandies’ history in the United States, and so on.

When I was reading that book, it crystallized for me why there are so many weirdos on these menswear forums. To some degree, these are people . . . I don’t know if they’re challenging ideas of like hetero masculinity at the time — to some degree they are, because throughout this history, as we know, there is this idea that men should not necessarily be into clothes. So if you’re interested in clothes to some kind of undue degree, or if it’s detectable, there’s some suspicion often cast on your gender and your sexuality.

Tom Wolfe wrote a really beautiful essay called “The Secret Vice” about this in 1966. It was published in the New York Herald Tribune. He talks about how men would rather be seen with a pornography magazine in public than a clothing catalog. I think he’s exaggerating to some degree, but he’s actually not that far off. It is true that the dandy is often bucking some convention of the day, if only because their dress tends to be, if not extravagant, at least unusual or noticeable.

Charles Baudelaire famously wrote that the dandy is the last flicker of decadence at a time of basically declining empire. If you go to Anderson’s book, it takes the story away from the idea of these really eccentric, rich figures and talks about how men of more modest means, some even poorer, have used clothes to express this decadence.

Sometimes people ask me about how fashion trends arise. Noam Chomsky is known for being a leftist critic, but he’s actually, professionally, a linguist. He’s famous for the phrase “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct but makes no sense. When you think of outfits as language, that you combine them using existing words and put them in the correct order to express something — that you’re rugged or refined or whatever it is — that is what makes an outfit good.

The dandy, or someone who’s innovating in some way, is usually someone with some type of cultural capital. When you think of slang, for example, how does slang come about? When you think of how new fashions get created and how people take existing words and flip them in new ways, you can think of clothes as similar to language, in that someone with cultural capital took something existing and turned it into something else, to mean something else. Someone takes an existing style — often like a work garment, like work boots or a work jacket — and flips it to mean something else. And since they have cultural capital, the style is now considered cool, and it gets put into the mainstream through some other medium, like a movie or music video.

Madras is typically a pure cotton. It’s typically handloomed. So the cloth has a sort of airy, slightly uneven quality to it. It’s because it’s so reliant on human labor. The fabric is not as smooth and consistent. This was also part of Gandhi’s political movement, in which he encouraged Indians to spin their own yarn, loom their own fabric, and use that fabric to make their own clothes so that they wouldn’t be reliant on British textiles.

Madras is an airy cotton that’s made for the Indian environment, which is very hot. But they dyed it in these really brilliant natural dyes that gave the fabric a very vibrant color. It kind of looks like the Scottish district checks, but they are tartans essentially. But the Madras checks are distinct in that they’re even brighter. I would describe [them as having] a happy color. Madras is also dyed with vegetable dyes, which doesn’t make it very colorfast — “colorfast” meaning how well the dye holds on to the yarn.

In fact, as India was making this cloth, some of it was exported to the United States, where Brooks Brothers, according to lore, had used this to make colorful summer shirts because it would be suitable for a hot, humid climate. As the story goes, they put these shirts on the sales floor, and one day, one of the customers came back into the store hopping mad. That person complained that when they had put their Madras shirt into the wash along with their other clothes, the color bled out and dyed their other clothes. Remember, this is a natural vegetable dye, so it doesn’t have the industrial qualities that you would get from a synthetic dye, or the kind of clothes that you and I are mostly familiar with. After that, Brooks Brothers stamped all of their Madras “Guaranteed to Bleed.” So it became this kind of desirable quality.

That material was used for shirts, and a heavier version of that material was used for jackets and sometimes pants. And then a company called Winston Tailors had also used cut-up pieces of Madras to make patchwork Madras, which was sometimes used for shirts, but mostly for jackets and pants.

The funny thing is, a lot of that language is lost today. Oftentimes on a menswear forum, you’ll get someone who’s new to clothing, and they’ll see that for the first time, and they’ll be like, “Are people serious? That is a really ugly garment.” Because when you look at a patchwork Madras jacket, it looks absurd, because it’s all of these riotous, happy colors cut up and stitched together into this Frankenstein monster jacket. But as we were talking about earlier, these clothes took on meaning because they were worn by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites sometime between the early [twentieth century] to about the 1970s. They took on meaning — wearing that demonstrated that you were part of the class of people whose lives kind of sat on a conveyor belt that moved them from Andover to Harvard to Wall Street. So it became canonical preppy style, but originally the fabric is from India.

It’s my favorite fabric. There are basically two ways to make fabric. Generally speaking, there’s a worsted and there’s a woolen. A worsted is when you comb the hairs prior to spinning them, which removes the shorter hairs and sets the hairs parallel to each other. Woolen is when you don’t comb the hair, so the hairs are sticking out in all directions.

Tweed is typically a woolen, which makes it more insulating because there are more air pockets. There are two contesting stories of how tweed got its name. One is that it got its name from the River Tweed, the area where some of this fabric first originated.

Yes. The other is that a cloth merchant sold a bolt of cloth of woolen twill to somebody, and they wrote on the receipt kind of messily. And the person who received it mistook the writing “twill” for “tweed” and then labeled it tweed.

We don’t really know where the word originally comes from, but it certainly comes out of the Scottish Borders area, where people historically wore this really thick, rough woolen cloth. Historically it would have been pretty drab, although nowadays it can sometimes come in bright colors — but it’s still usually pretty drab. It’s worn because of its durability.

If you go to thrift stores today, you can still find tweed jackets, assuming they haven’t been eaten through by moths. They’re usually still pretty intact because it’s a really tough fabric, which is because of that woolen quality, the hairs sticking out in all different directions. There are all these air pockets, which makes it pretty warm; I would say any temperature below 65 degrees, you can usually wear a tweed of some weight. The weight typically starts around thirteen or fourteen ounces. You don’t typically find lightweight tweeds because to get a lightweight fabric you usually have to use a worsted yarn. We associate tweed now with the autumn and winter months naturally, because you need it to be a bit cold to wear it.

We also associate it with the country historically. A lot of men’s dress norms, at least when we’re talking about classic tailored clothing, are derived from England and specifically aristocrats — essentially the kings, princes, and the people that would have been born into money. Those people typically had wardrobes divided in half.

Back then, clothes were dictated by the idea of time, place, and occasion. If you were to go to London to do business, you’d wear a dark worsted suit — worsted meaning that very slick kind of yarn. And that would be in either navy or gray. You’d wear a white dress shirt, a dark tie, and black calfskin oxfords. If you were to go to the country to hunt pheasants, ride a horse, or hang out on your estate, you would wear some type of tweed. Usually that’s in an earthy color — olive or more often brown, sometimes gray — and you would pair it with whipcord trousers, a tattersall shirt, a wool tie, and Scotch green shoes.

There’s a really good scene in the Netflix series The Crown, where Margaret Thatcher and the Queen interact. Margaret Thatcher grew up upper-middle class, the daughter of a businessman, and in a city environment. She basically only knows about politics and Westminster and that kind of life. The Queen, of course, is obviously the Queen, and she’s an aristocrat. She grew up in the system where people had wardrobes divided by city and country. There’s a scene where Margaret Thatcher visits the Queen at one of the Scottish estates, Balmoral. She arrives, and because social interactions are what they are and people live certain lifestyles, and it’s very clear if you’re not of that background, she is by default put through a series of tests.

One of the tests is when she’s invited to go hunting with the Queen and some of the royals. She walks out to meet the family that morning and everyone is wearing tweed and wax Barbour jackets and hunting boots. When Margaret Thatcher emerges from the castle to meet the Queen, she’s in a delicate blue dress and basically business shoes. And everybody in the royal family looks at her like, what are you doing? This is so odd. She’s obviously an outsider.

They get into the car, and they talk about their childhoods. And as they’re going through the countryside, the Queen quips at her, saying that next time you come on these trips, maybe you shouldn’t wear a bright blue dress because the animals that we’re stalking will see you. Maybe you shouldn’t wear perfume because the animals can smell you. And then as she’s talking, Thatcher stumbles and lets out a yelp, and then the Queen says, maybe you also shouldn’t make noise because the animals can hear you. So there was a certain logic to these clothes: people wore really tough clothes and earthy colors so that they could hide in the environment and shoot an animal.

The scene ends with them going back to the estate and the royals having tea. Thatcher and her husband come into the room, and the husband is wearing a tuxedo. Everyone is surprised because a tuxedo at the time would have been worn for dinner, and they’re just thinking, why are you wearing dinner clothes at teatime? This gets back to the idea that clothes [were determined by] by time, place, and occasion. You wore certain things to go hunting; you wore certain clothes for dinner; you wore certain clothes to have afternoon tea. By constantly failing these tests, you demonstrated. . . . If you hang out with a new crowd and they all speak a certain kind of slang, it’s obvious when you are clumsy with the slang, the slang is not natural to you, or you just don’t speak the language.

That’s something that I’ve learned over the course of my life, that unfortunately, you just can’t escape who you are. You are who you are. I remember I had a conversation with a friend of mine who happens to be very wealthy, and I’m not wealthy. My parents are refugees from Vietnam. I asked him once what watch I should get, a recommendation. He has really excellent taste. And he said, “Why don’t you get a Rolex Explorer? Because that’s more of an intellectual watch.” I think he basically meant, you’re kind of a nerdy dude.

Which made me realize, as I’ve gotten older, you can’t escape who you are. You know, if you’re middle class, you come off as middle class. If you’re nerdy, you’re nerdy. You are who you are, and your taste kind of reflects that.

There are many different types of wool. It’s not just sheep. You can get garments made from Angora, a kind of rabbit hair. I’ve seen people make sweaters out of cat and dog hair.

But when we talk about wool clothes, we are typically talking about sheep. However, there are many different types of sheep. Cheviot produces a very curly kind of hair. Cashmere is taken from a cashmere goat in Mongolia. And Shetland is a type of sheep that grows on the Shetland Isles, and the cold weather produces a very coarse kind of [wool] . . . not as curly as the Cheviot sheep’s but a lot of these animal hairs have a natural kind of crimp in them, kind of scratchy — not terribly scratchy, but it’s not super soft either.

It’s sometimes used for jackets; it’s rarely used for pants, because pants are more likely to sit against bare skin. What you’ll sometimes see is a Shetland tweed. Lovett is a mill that produces some really nice Shetland tweed fabrics. But since the hair is kind of thick, you get very spongy fabrics more often. Where people are going to encounter Shetland is in the form of a sweater. I love Shetland sweaters. They are again a little bit coarser, a little bit rougher. It’s not something that most people would want to wear over a T-shirt. You could probably wear certain cashmere sweaters over a T-shirt; a Shetland knit requires a long-sleeved button-up shirt underneath.

Historically, as the story goes — again, this is mixed with marketing lore, so you have to take this with a grain of salt — as Brooks Brothers tells the story, when they imported Shetland wool sweaters from the British Isles, they arrived at their stores and customers would buy them. Occasionally these customers would complain of a fishy smell on very wet days. And supposedly this came from the fact that many of these sweaters were knitted in the home, sometimes in the kitchen, where women would be cooking fish. Is that story really true? I don’t know. It’s just a charming thing that’s passed around. But it is true that in this time period, and especially around the Scottish Borders and throughout England, there’s a lot of cottage industry, so oftentimes people were sourcing clothes from a company that had a network of outworkers that would work from home.

The Shetland sweater, specifically because it was imported from Britain and then sold through Brooks Brothers — Brooks Brothers’ original customers were typically people in urban areas like Boston and New York, and they typically were white, upper-middle-class people, WASPs who came from well-to-do backgrounds. Since it was worn by those people, it became somewhat of a status symbol.

The classic Shetland sweaters tend to feature a saddle shoulder, which means they don’t have a vertical shoulder seam. It has this shoulder seam that goes halfway up to your arm and then cuts toward your neck. These sweaters were sold at J. Press, Andover Shop, Brooks Brothers; they were worn by Supreme Court justices, lawyers, bankers, well-to-do people, and so on.

It’s a good value because you generally see Shetland sweaters retail for between, I would say, $125 to $250. Sometimes, depending on the company, you can go up to $300, but I would say around $200 to $225 is what you can expect to pay for a genuine Shetland knit made outside of China — made in England or Britain somewhere. I think they’re a good value because it’s a harder-wearing sweater, whereas if you were to buy a $150 or $200 cashmere knit, oftentimes because cashmere is such an expensive fiber, that company will cut back on the material. They’ll knit the sweater a little more loosely, so then it’s prone to stretching out. When you’re buying a Shetland knit for $200 or $225, it’s not a cheap garment by any means, but it will last you a long time.

Brooks Brothers was started by Henry Sands Brooks in 1818. He opened a store in New York City. The very first people who he hired were typically German immigrant tailors. Most people that made clothes in the United States tended to be newly arrived immigrants, and at that time it tended to be German immigrants who had tailoring skills.

Before the invention of ready-to-wear, most men had clothes made for them, either in the home or, if they could afford one, by a tailor. There was some ready-to-wear before this period, but it tended to be relegated to workwear stuff that would be worn by slaves and then lower working-class people, like miners and sailors and whatnot. People who would be working in what would be considered bourgeois society, like clerks or administrators, typically had clothes made for them.

Brooks Brothers invented the first ready-made suit. The very first ready-made suits were pretty rough. They weren’t very good. In fact, Brooks Brothers got into trouble because they supplied clothes to both sides of the Civil War, and some of those clothes ended up falling apart and dissolving in the rain. The term “shoddy” comes from that period where those fabrics were sometimes made by sweeping up the kind of leftover stuff that would be on the ground at the mill and then gluing them together and making this garment, because they had to make so much stuff for both sides. So once these soldiers were out marching in the war, if it rained, the suits would fall apart. The soldiers had these really funny songs that they sang about Brooks Brothers’ crappy clothes. The US government eventually sued Brooks Brothers for selling them these crappy clothes.

Exactly. But over time, the system got much better. One of the reasons it got better is because Brooks Brothers, as well as other regular manufacturers, got the body measurements of a wide range of people, from people who were forced to enlist in the army.

The army would measure people. They figure out your shoulder width and your chest size and your waist size. And through all of this data, Brooks Brothers was able to figure out your likely height, waist size, stomach size, and more, based just on your chest size. So if you have a size 38 chest, you probably have this for the shoulder and this for the waist, and you’re probably this height, and so on. This is how, over time, ready-to-wear work was improved.

The No. 1 Sack Suit, which is what Brooks Brothers called this new model, was debuted [around the turn of the century]. The hallmark of that style was a soft shoulder. You have to contextualize this all within the time period. If you were to pick up a No. 1 Sack Suit today, most people would not consider that a soft shoulder. But in 1901, that was considered a soft shoulder, meaning it had less padding in the shoulder.

Yes, exactly. So first, it had a soft shoulder. It also had a hook vent. If you look at suit jackets, they typically either have side vents, which are the slits that go up the back, but a side vent means two slits toward the sides — or it had a hook vent, which means a center slit. The Brooks Brothers’ version had the center slit that was originally designed for horse riding, but they also cut into it a little bit to kind of create a hook.

The most telling part of the No. 1 Sack Suit was that it had a dartless front. If you look at British tailoring and Italian tailoring, you’ll typically see a line that runs right below the breast pocket down to about the hip pocket in England. In Naples, Italy, tailors will extend it all the way to the hem. A dart is basically a way to cut the fabric and then sew it together to create shape. English and Italian tailors will put a dart on both sides of the front, running from right about your rib cage to the pocket, and Neapolitan tailors will extend to the hem to create a curve that will hug your body a little bit more. The American sack suit doesn’t have a front dart, so the sides are a bit straighter.

The other thing I would note, and this is a little bit more obscure, is that American clothing manufacturing had always been more industrial than its European counterparts. When you construct a suit-jacket lapel, there’s the front fabric and then the back fabric. Since you can’t just have a raw fabric edge sticking out, the edge has to be folded in and then stitched together to finish that lapel. A tailor or a manufacturer will also have to stitch that down so that the lapel doesn’t curve to the wrong side.

In Europe, they’ll do that by hand, using what’s known as a pick stitch — which means you’re basically picking up layers of cloth and then pricking them through to stitch those four layers down. Brooks Brothers used a machine stitch. So if you look at a British-made or Italian-made high-end suit, you’ll see very gentle pinpricks that basically go down the line of the lapel. On an American suit, you’ll see a straight line of stitching, and that indicates that it was sewn by machine and not by hand.

Today this is complicated a little by the fact that they also have machines to imitate the handmade pick stitch. But generally speaking, if someone is making a true sack suit defined by what Brooks Brothers put out, they’ll even imitate the machine stitching along the lapel. I think it’s interesting in the sense that this was the beginning of the kind of democratization of clothing.

What we were talking about earlier, the painful history of tailoring, cotton-picking, slavery, British imperialism . . . I would say that there is this other part of the American side of the story. One way to conceptualize the evolution of men’s clothing is that dress often follows who we consider matters in society. So in the 1800s, you had all these upper-class gentlemen who were wearing frock coats and top hats. By the turn of the century, as the bourgeois class started to see their fortunes rise with industrial capitalism, their clothes took on meaning. You start to see the rise of their uniform, which is the suit.

It goes without saying that we are specifically talking about white males, usually of a certain background. We’re not talking about miners or sailors and so on. We’re not talking about black Americans or Chinese Americans or any of these people. We’re talking about white American males that come from middle-class and bourgeois backgrounds. Their dress started to take on status, such that the factory owners and the managers of those factories wore a similar uniform. That development demonstrated that a new class of people started to matter in American society, which is the white male bourgeois.

The sack suit is also interesting in the sense that the garment is factory made. It’s not bench-made — made by a tailor sitting at a bench. It’s made in a factory. It features straighter sides. The lapel, generally speaking, takes less time to produce because you’re doing a machine-stitch edge instead of a hand-picked edge. So it’s a little bit more of a democratic, affordable garment. We now think of that time period as regressive. But that was kind of a progressive part of that moment, at least more progressive than what it was before.

So the No. 1 Sack Suit basically carried a certain class of men from the hopping jazz clubs of the 1920s, through the Great Depression, and onto the Ivy League campuses of a booming postwar America. That is how that specific uniform took on meaning, specifically the sack suit and the white button-down shirt, which is basically the shirt that this class of Americans would wear.

Sometimes people use the term “button-down” to refer to a shirt with a button front, which is sometimes called a coat front, which is not actually technically correct. That would be called a button-up shirt. A button-down shirt refers to when the collars button down onto the body of the shirt, forming kind of an S-shaped curve. That was also introduced by Brooks Brothers at the turn of the twentieth century, inspired by this kind of collar invention worn by British polo players.

So they wore the Sack-cut suit with a button-down shirt, often a striped tie. The striped tie went in the opposite direction of the British ties. On the British ties, their stripes went in a certain direction. Brooks Brothers didn’t want to seem like they were copying the British, because the British stripes actually referred to associations in the British military, or certain schools.

They had their stripes running in the opposite direction, and then they would wear things like long wings or gunboats, which is a type of wingtip shoe. Or they would wear penny loafers or tassel loafers. They would wear cuffed trousers or flat-front trousers.

The easiest way to conceptualize this is that this was the uniform in the film The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Gregory Peck in that film actually wears a suit from Huntsman, which is a tailor on Savile Row, so that shoulder is very structured. It’s not soft at all. But that uniform represented basically a certain kind of man.

That man, especially in the postwar period, was a white man who went to war to fight in the trenches of Europe, came back and was afforded a free college education through the GI Bill, went to college and then came out of college, and got some type of corporate job, which he used to then pay for, like, a nuclear family that he raised behind a white picket fence. Basically, that kind of lifestyle, that system, that conveyor belt was basically the socialization of a new class of bourgeois.

Since Brooks Brothers had dressed American section of the elites, their clothes were copied throughout the United States. There are all sorts of clothes that offer their version of the sack cut, their version of the button-down collar.

There were other two important clothiers at the time, which were J. Press and the Andover Shop, which clothed students at these elite colleges like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and so forth. Those students would have worn some version of Brooks Brothers when they went to Andover and all of these preparatory schools that landed them in the Ivy League colleges. But by buying their clothes from the Andover Shop and J. Press, which were located near the campuses, they could avoid going all the way to New York to get their clothes from Brooks Brothers. They would just buy the Brooks-y Ivy style from the local campus clothier.

When those people graduate college, they continued to wear that type of clothing that they had worn at Andover and Harvard. They would wear that clothing while working in Washington politics and law, New York finance.

That’s what Brooks Brothers represented. I would say that class of people started to fade from real cultural and political influence during the 1980s. As I mentioned, I talked to David Marx, and we talked about what power meant in different eras, [what it meant] to demonstrate cultural sophistication, political power, economic power, and cultural capital.

If you were to demonstrate that in the 1980s, it might be about knowing how to talk about fine art and literature to George Plimpton at an invite-only New Yorker party. In New York today — first of all, I don’t even think there’s anyone like George Plimpton. The people that descend from that class don’t even dress like George Plimpton anymore. So that kind of character is gone. But certainly to demonstrate that now, according to Marx, it would be more like talking about cryptocurrencies and Twitter discussions with Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk at an MMA fight or something. It would not be a New Yorker party.

In fact, even saying that you care about talking about fine art and literature to George Plimpton at a New Yorker party demonstrates that you’re not part of a class that has any relevance. You’re basically like a menswear blogger. You know what I’m saying? Like, Mark Zuckerberg does not give a flying hoot about that stuff. And Elon Musk and [Jeff] Bezos. All of those people — they don’t come from that class of people. The only person in any kind of semi-high position that comes from that class of people in recent memory is like Mitt Romney — or who’s the prosecutor that did the Russia report?

Robert Mueller comes from that background. John Kerry comes from that background. All of those people are on the sidelines of politics now and age-wise they are on their way out. The people that hold power did not grow up in that WASP-y society.

The important thing to understand about Brooks Brothers’ place in that history is that if we think about clothing as social language, Brooks Brothers gave American men their ABCs. There’s a brand called Aimé Leon Dore, which is a super-hyped — I guess you could kind of call it “streetwear,” although that’s kind of a loaded term nowadays — and they do tennis sweaters. They do button-down shirts. Noah is another super popular streetwear brand. Brendon Babenzien, who is the founder of that brand, recently disagreed that Noah can be classified as streetwear. He thinks of his clothes as prep.

That’s because button-downs and Shetland sweaters and tweed jackets are like the ABCs of our American clothing menswear language, but they are constantly being recontextualized to mean prep or streetwear, depending on how someone’s styling it. Aimé Leon Dore is basically recontextualization, in my opinion, of Ralph Lauren, and Ralph Lauren is just a recontextualization of Brooks Brothers for different generations and for different demographics.

To answer that question, you have to understand, again, prior to the popularization of ready-to-wear clothing, most men had clothes made in the home — or by a tailor if they could afford one.

If they were getting a suit made, sometimes it would be made by one person. Other times, it’d be made by two, sometimes three people: the cutter, the person who’s drafting and cutting your pattern; the coat-maker, the person who’s taking those cut pieces and sewing them together; and the trouser-maker, the person who’s doing the same thing but for trousers. Sometimes there’d be an additional person called the finisher, who would be finishing the buttonholes and doing the ironwork and things like that.

That is the original cottage system of how clothes were made. When ready-to-wear appeared and became refined, the system became industrialized. In that old, traditional system of bespoke, you have two main people: the cutter and the tailor. We talked about the cutter, the person cutting and drafting a pattern; the person sewing the pieces together is the tailor.

When it moved to the industrial system, these two roles get split up into many different parts. You have the pattern-maker, who’s the person that’s constructing the architectural blueprint for the pattern. You have the designer, who’s sometimes not even someone who even knows how to sew or draft a pattern. Then you have the people on the sewing line who are sewing these things together.

Even those parts can be broken into components, so you have someone who just does the collar, someone who just does the sleeve, and so on. Then you have the presser, the buttonhole makers, etc. That is a good way to understand the original breakup of how manufacturing through industrialization goes, through the system that Adam Smith had originally written about, specialization over time.

This is not just within clothing, but within [many sectors]. You have these different specializations, where it’s possible these [different jobs] start drifting away, especially with free-trade agreements. For example, the person who spun the yarn — maybe the person is not the farmer — they go to a farmer and buy a bunch of wool, and they bring the wool home and spin the yarn. And then they bring the yarn to their loom and make some fabric, and then they sell that fabric.

Now all of a sudden, you have people like the farmers in Mongolia — they’re growing the cashmere, brushing it off the animal. They sell it to auction houses. The auction houses are auctioning it off to buyers. Those buyers then sell it to spinners. That spinner, for example in cashmere, might be Todd and Duncan in Scotland. Todd and Duncan takes those cashmere fibers from Mongolia, spins it into yarn, and then they create cones of yarn.

These cones are then sold; often they’ll be sold to, let’s say, a mill in Scotland or Italy or sometimes even the United States. That mill will put these cones on machines and they’ll weave fabric. Now they have fabric and will sell that to someone.

That could be anybody. Garment factories in China, Italy, England, the US, Latin America, Bangladesh — a factory will buy the fabric. And then a designer comes to it and says, I want to make this design. Then there are all of these specialized components, these specialized people within that factory. They make the item — import various trims and all of the components that we’re talking about. The buttons, the inner linings, the padding, the shoulder pads — all of these have their own separate supply chains that have drifted off and gone through a similar system.

All this then comes together into a garment that arrives in your hands with a label inside that says “Made in X.” That label is governed by a certain country’s laws. In the United States, in order to say something is made in America, the garment has to be made from start to finish in the US, unless there is some part that just simply cannot be sourced here. To give an example, if you buy a T-shirt and it says “Made in the USA,” under federal law, the fiber has to be grown here, the yarn has to be spun here, the fabric has to be woven here, the garment has to be cut and sewn here. Then if there’s a graphic on it, the graphic has to be applied in the United States for it to carry the “Made in the USA” label.

That’s federal law. The reality is that you are probably not going to get caught if you break that law, because Uncle Sam is not sitting next to you the entire time making sure that you are abiding by the law. Someone has to rat you out for you to get caught. It’s hard to get caught. Essentially, what ends up happening is that some very large companies, like Levi’s and L. L. Bean, do get caught breaking this law. Typically, they have legal teams that advise them to follow the letter [of the law], and if it doesn’t say “Made in China” or “Made in Bangladesh” or whatever, if it’s made in America, it will say “Made in America from imported materials.”

Those big companies are very cautious about getting caught. Although, again, if you Google “FTC [Federal Trade Commission] fines clothing company,” you’ll find a bunch of big companies that will have been charged pretty hefty fines for not following federal law on this.

However, in Italy, for example, it’s common for a garment to be almost entirely made abroad, brought to Italy, and then finished with some process, we’ll say, that is not the majority of the process. And then it gets slapped with a “Made in Italy” label.

Whatever the country’s laws are governing the country-of-origin label, the reality is that there is often a supply chain in the system that is not fully captured by the label. So even if it says something like “Made in China,” the fibers could have been grown in one part of the world, spun into yarn in another, and woven into fabric in another; the design could happen anywhere. That comes to a factory, and all of this comes together for a garment.

Some of these places can have specializations. There’s some debate on why this is. For “connoisseurs” or people who really care about this stuff, Japanese denim tends to be held in a certain high regard because it’s considered more interesting, more unique, more artisanal. There is something about Japanese denim. That could be a result of just regional labor expertise and skill.

Another part, some would argue, has to do with something inherent to the region. Again, you always have to take this with a grain of salt because there is some commercial marketing interest in this. But if we are to take companies at their word, Italian mills will tell you that you cannot produce Italian fabric the way they produce it in Italy. Every time you are spinning the yarn and then weaving the fabric, it has to be washed because you have to get rid of the impurities in the fiber for it to be usable in clothing. According to Italians, there’s something about the Italian water that gives it a certain handle.

Some of this about regional specialization possibly has something to do with the climate, water, animals, whatever. On the issue of garment production, once you conceptualize it as: Originally there was a guy who went to his tailor. There was a tailor and cutter in the local area. They worked with local fabric mills that sourced yarns from a local company and got their fibers from local sheep. . . . All of that started to go through the Adam Smith capitalism process of specialization. Then over time, especially with both free-trade agreements and digital technology, a lot of these parts of the industry started to physically drift away, go to other areas of the world. And over time, those areas have also developed certain specializations.

We’ve had globalization for centuries, but certainly in the way that we talk about garment manufacturing in the United States, a lot of the offshoring started to happen in the 1990s. Although American clothing companies were already facing pressures in the 1990s — that’s how we ended up getting the fast-fashion system.

People often think of the term “fast fashion” as just meaning cheap clothing. That’s not what it means. Fast fashion is a specific mode of production. Originally you had the cutter and tailor: You as a man would go to your tailor and you’d say, “I need a suit for work. I’m a clerk at this office,” or “I need a suit to go to a summer wedding.” The tailor would give you some fabrics to choose from, and then you’d come out with the thing that you’re supposed to wear. Again, that thing was dictated by time, place, and occasion.

As we move into the industrial period with ready-to-wear clothing and then the breakup of the cutter into designer and patternmaker, who are also working in conjunction with the designer, we now move into a new system of clothing production. A designer sitting somewhere in an office is imagining a collection and they’re thinking, my collection is inspired by the French Riviera, or the American cowboy, or the Italian industrialists, or whatever it is. And they develop this collection that they think men will want to wear. They identify a market — they think twenty-five-year-old finance guy or sixty-year-old working-class guy, whatever it is — and figures out the pattern, the typical body shape.

That person develops this line, creates samples, and brings those samples to a trade show. That’s where we get runway shows or we get trade shows like Pitti Uomo or Magic. They show their samples on models or sometimes just as part of a collection. Then, at that trade show, there are store buyers, and the store buyer says, I love this jacket, those pants, and I think the people that come to my store will want to buy that. I’ll order 100 units, or 500 units, or whatever. Now the designer goes to their factory and says, OK, I need to produce all of these clothes for these orders, and they’ll produce them and then ship them to the store about six months later.

So when you go to a store, the clothes that you can touch and see have gone through a long developmental process. First, there was the factory that made it — that was six months ago. That was when they placed the order. And the development process for that garment, of designing and thinking of that collection, that could have been a year or a year and a half ago.

Yeah. When you go to J.Crew and you’re touching a garment, the person who designed that is now already thinking a season and a half out. Like, if you’re touching that garment in October, that person is already thinking about next year’s October collection. That system has a natural lag time to it.

In the 1990s, when we talk about the opening of free trade, American clothing companies were already experiencing pressure from international brands. There were already imports; it just was not [Bill] Clinton levels of offshoring. Those stores started to feel like they needed to figure out a way to be more competitive.

So instead of ordering, say, a hundred of this item and two hundred of that item, they would stock very shallow amounts. They would say, I only want, like, twenty of this item and fifty of that item. Then they would stock the shelves and have an inventory system.

Again, going back to the idea that our clothing styles rest on the shifting tectonic plates of politics, economics, and technology — it required a digital technology system to manage the inventory. When the store saw that it bought fifty red shirts and fifty blue shirts but everybody’s buying the blue shirts and nobody’s really buying the red shirts, the store would have a shallow inventory system. And it could catch it right at the moment that it started to notice the blue shirts are moving really quickly, so [the store would] quickly re-up. That factory would immediately go into production and then ship out those blue shirts so the store could restock very quickly.

Yes, exactly. Just as the Japanese had done this for car manufacturing, American retailers took this for clothing retailing.

Now you’re doing two things. One is that you’re exposing yourself to less risk, because what happens if you buy fifty blue shirts and fifty red shirts, and the blue shirts sell out, but only one person bought a red shirt, and now you’ve got forty-nine pieces that you have to put on sale? You might break even, or you possibly lose money. Now you expose yourself to less risk because you’re stocking shallowly.

The other thing is that you can quickly re-up, and you can respond to trends. Because remember, back in the old system, a designer is thinking of what you want, and then they go into production. You go to the store, and you’re the ultimate judge. It could be, all of a sudden Brad Pitt walks onto the red carpet and he’s wearing a blue shirt. Now everybody wants blue shirts. A designer can’t possibly account for all of these crazy, quick trends.

It was the Americans who actually came up with the just-in-time production system for retail that then gets transported and refined by European companies such as Zara and H&M, which controlled the vertical integration of the system. In the old system, whereas a designer might design a collection and ship a spring/summer collection and a fall/winter collection that then gets moved over time to spring, summer, fall, winter, and sometimes pre-fall, pre-spring. They’re doing more and more drops, but once you get into the fast-fashion system where a company can stock shallowly and they can respond more quickly, they start doing fifteen, twenty, fifty, sixty collections per year.

So if you go to Zara every single week, there’s going to be new items because they’re responding to the fact that Kim Kardashian just posted a photo on Instagram, and then a couple weeks later, they’ll have their version of that in the store. Zara and H&M are also prehistoric at this point. That’s old news.

Yeah, the new system is Shein and Temu, and they have new stuff every day, by the hour. Computers are constantly figuring out not only what’s selling in their store but what’s selling on the market. If fleece is trending and double riders are trending, all of a sudden they’ll do a fleece double rider. They’re just combining random things.

Yeah. [There are a couple problems with] fast fashion. As long as you understand that fashion is social language and is a way for us to identify with groups and signal our individuality within groups, you then understand what’s wrong with the system. In the previous system, we were dressing according to time, place, and occasion — which was restrictive. It was not great for expression. Then we moved to a system where there are designers and factories that are presenting these collections and ideas, and then a down-market clothier would be like, that sold at Tom Ford. And then a mid-tier clothier copied it, and that sold pretty well. So I, as a low-tier clothier, will copy the mid-tier version and then introduce it, and that would be like two or three years out from when Tom Ford originally introduced it.

Then we move into the system where things move much more quickly, so as soon as Tom Ford debuts it on the runway, you already have the Shein version that’s online. Sometimes the Shein version is available to consumers before the designer version, because the designer version still has to go through the whole factory six-month drop system, whereas the Shein version is like. . . . There was a funny post where a fast-fashion brand posted a photo. Kim Kardashian had worn a sample from a designer, and then hours later, the fast-fashion brand posted their photo, and it said something like, “The devil works hard, but we work harder.”

There’s a human cost to it if you’re the consumer who’s buying through these rapid trends. Whereas in the old system you buy something from a tailor and you’re wearing it for decades, in the new system, you’re constantly trying to keep up with trends. If you’re buying hundreds of garments per year, you can’t spend that much on one garment unless you’re literally Kim Kardashian. Most people have a certain budget. So then the cost of the item has to fall.

When the cost of the item has to fall, certainly you have to cut back on the quality of the materials, but more important, as Marx pointed out, the capitalist can turn a profit by squeezing wages. The capitalist is always trying to squeeze the wage. That’s how you get these really horrible systems where . . . I interviewed a garment worker who worked in a LA sweatshop. She said, for some of these fast-fashion dresses that sell for $50 or so, she gets paid $0.15.

That’s in Los Angeles. People are going to be like, “How’s that possible? We have minimum wage laws.” Garment factories work on a piece-rate system where the garment worker is paid per operation, not per amount of time worked. Many people will be familiar with this. For example, I’m a freelance writer, so someone will pay me a certain amount to write an essay. I could spend one thousand hours on that essay, I could spend an hour on that essay, but I’m getting paid by the essay.

It’s somewhat similar in a garment factory in that you get paid for sewing the sleeve, the collar, and so on. When I was interviewing this garment worker, there was a moment when I choked up; I couldn’t take it anymore. I asked her how much she takes home per week. From what I remember, it was around $300 per week. It’s very, very low — she worked seven days a week, twelve-hour days. And I said, how do you pay rent in Los Angeles? And she said she lives in a two-bedroom apartment with seven people. There are two people in each bedroom, two people in the living room, and she sleeps on the floor in the kitchen.

I’m sure your readers know Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, an incredible book about the history of Los Angeles. It talks about the surveillance system that separates different classes in Los Angeles, which is indicative of not only America but also how the world is structured. The garment district where this woman works and then goes home and sleeps on the floor of a bustling kitchen . . . just a few blocks away. The clothes are being presented in this glamorous, aspirational way. But what actually makes that price possible is the toil that you don’t see where that woman works just blocks ahead.

And that system exists, one, because of the piece-rate system. But two, the physical separation of your ability to see this is enforced by the police, who push homeless people away so that they don’t bum you out when you go shopping. This happens in every city. Instead of solving homelessness, we just don’t want to see the people: you just can’t loiter here. You can’t sleep on the bench. You can’t sleep here; you can’t sleep there. But the homeless person is going to be homeless whether you see them or not.

In this specific LA geographical area, the garment district, where you can physically go and see these sweatshops — it’s like a ten-minute drive — and go to the shopping center, and that center is gleaming and beautiful. All of the clothes are presented in this beautiful way. It’s enforced by all of the systems that Mike Davis wrote about in City of Quartz: the cameras, the police, all of this stuff to make sure that you don’t see the ugliness that will bum you out.

We talked earlier about this offshoring system. There’s a lot of discussion now about bringing garment manufacturing back. I personally think that instead of trying to reshore all of garment manufacturing, we should as a country focus on the high-end parts that we can export onto the global market.

People say, why can’t we make stuff as we did in the 1960s? Two things. One is that whenever we talk about American garment manufacturing in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, and so forth, we have to understand that there were massive government scaffolding programs that trained people how to sew. There were the 4-H programs. The USDA [Department of Agriculture] had a Bureau of Home Economics that taught people how to sew. And then there were obviously home-economics programs teaching women how to sew, because this was a time when labor was divided by gender.

It’s not that people just came out of high school with nothing and then filled garment factories. These people knew how to sew. And over the course of the twentieth century, many of those programs started to recede — reasonably, because America was moving toward a kind of postindustrial economy. When I was going to school, we didn’t really have home-economics programs. We had typing classes, keyboard classes, because they were training us for email jobs. That’s where we all thought the economy was going and where the economy has gone.

Even within the garment factory, there’s a division of class and all this stuff that we’re talking about. The people who are pattern-makers tend to make more money and are a bit more privileged. The people working on the sewing line are typically immigrants. Why are they immigrants? Because those people learned how to sew back home. In the Brooks Brothers days, those were German immigrants. In the early twentieth century, there were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe as well as Italians. And then nowadays, they tend to be from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

Those people learned how to sew from grandma back home, because to them, a shirt is not completely disposable. If a shirt rips, you repair it. In the United States, most people are not going to take the time to sew because, one, the government programs have receded, which incidentally . . . Trump would have to strike down another pillar of his administration, which is basically cutting government spending, to build that manufacturing force back. There has to be a kind of state industrial policy.

Essentially, it’s what China has had. The reason why we don’t know how to sew is because those government programs have receded. And then with free-trade [agreements], who’s going to learn how to mend a shirt when the shirt’s twenty bucks? You can take it to a tailor; the tailor is going to charge you more than twenty bucks to mend it. Are you going to spend hours learning how to use a sewing machine to mend a $20 shirt? Most people are just going to buy a new shirt. That’s assuming they’re even wearing a woven shirt. You can get a T-shirt for like five bucks. No one’s going to learn how to repair a T-shirt.

That whole skill set has basically disappeared in the United States. So my feeling is that, instead of reshoring cheap T-shirts or mid-tier jeans, those basic clothes that are in almost everyone’s closet, we should move up the value chain toward more complicated outerwear. We should focus on tailored trouser suits, high-end shoes, things like that. We should focus on high-end leather bags.

When you look at other countries that have gone through industrialization and are in postindustrial economies or some variation of that, what do they do? Do you think of Italy? In Milan, they focus on high-end fashion. When you look at Japan, they focus on high-end denim.

The Japanese government also has programs to support those things. One, for example, is that if you own a Japanese denim brand or even a clothing brand and you want to show your samples at a trade show in Milan or New York or whatever, you can apply for a grant from the government to pay for your booth at the trade show as well as your flight expenses. Clutch Cafe is a store in London, and it’s in a very high-end part of London. It only carries Japanese clothes. The Japanese government pays for the entire rent of that store, and it pays for the rent of that store because it’s trying to raise the prestige of the idea of Japanese-made clothes.

In the immediate postwar years, Japanese production was not seen as high-end. It took a lot of industrial policy for Japan to present its manufacturing as high-end and support those companies. We don’t have that in the United States — the US government is not going to pay for you to show your jeans in Milan. And if it did, there’s a part of American politics that would freak out about it.

Some Americans are going to buy American-made clothes, and they’ll buy $200 jeans and $500 shoes. They’re like fashion dudes, including me, and I support all of that. But instead of trying to make all of these Americans buy $50 T-shirts and $200 jeans, we should focus on the export market.

An easy thing that we could regulate right now is to crack down on the labeling so that if you’re selling something online, you say where it’s made. Sometimes you visit these websites, especially for some of these MAGA influencers, and they’re selling an “I’m a Patriot” T-shirt or whatever. The product page doesn’t say where it’s made. You have to really dig around to find out it’s made in Nicaragua.

I’ve done the shtick, if you want to call it that, on Twitter, but I’m sincere. When I see someone lamenting [the decline of] American manufacturing, I look at their bio, and I see if they have a company. If they have a company, I see if they have merch, which is basically an apparel line, and I try to find out where the items are made.

And 99 percent of the time the product page will not say where it’s made. Sometimes it will say designed and printed in America and then not say where it’s made. But if you copy the text for the specs of the shirt, you can usually figure out who made the shirt. It’s usually Next Level Apparel or Gildan or some of these other mass manufacturers.

Yeah. To me, the government should crack down on labeling. If you say “American-made,” it has to be made from start to finish in the United States. Because that’s the common understanding — when the consumer sees “American-made,” that’s what they think. Then when you’re selling online, you have to say where it’s made. So if you’re caught lying — if you say “Made in USA,” but you’re actually just importing a Latin American blank and printing on it — you have to pay a fine.

Because if someone is following the law, and they’re trying to create US jobs, and they slap on an American-made label and their printed T-shirt is $30 to $60, and this guy has another T-shirt and it says, “Hell Yeah, America” but it’s $19 . . . the average consumer is like, the guy that is selling me a $50 T-shirt is ripping me off. They’re always thinking that the person at the higher price is ripping them off.

Yes. So we need a clear differentiation. Then the government should try to promote high-end manufacturing, and then [have] those American-made clothes create the idea that American-made carries the same prestige as “Made in Italy,” so that people are willing to buy that premium product.

Most people will know this kind of figure mostly through Andrew Tate, because I think his reach extends beyond the kind of the community that he speaks to. But I would note two things. One is that not all of the people in that space — certainly not all of them are accused of the things that Andrew Tate is accused of in terms of criminal offenses — but they also may not share his politics. The central point of this community, this manosphere, is the idea of optimization of your life: building muscle, making money, driving fast cars. Some of them like living in luxurious apartments, some of them sleeping with many women. There’s a kind of alpha-ness to this idea.

I started the essay with this introduction, but I talked about four distinct periods of men’s style history that have fed into this. One of them was Eugen Sandow, who was a Prussian bodybuilder during the Industrial Revolution. I think most people think of body build now as, like, “Yeah, that looks good.” It’s good to look like that. In the early 1800s, when our aesthetics were more shaped by the romanticism movement, that was not considered the height of male beauty. The height of male beauty was like a frail, pale figure who was touched by consumption, which was the term for tuberculosis at the time. Basically a waify, pale, intellectual, gentle, romantic figure.

High-class men, or men of a particular social status, did not want to lift weights at the time because visible muscle mass signaled that you were a field hand, that you were a low-class person, that you were a manual worker. It took Eugen Sandow to reconceptualize it, as he grew in fame and promoted the idea of bodybuilding not as a working-class thing but a bourgeois thing — to show that you belong to bourgeois society, that you demonstrated self-mastery. He reconceptualized our idea of what it meant to be an aspirational body type into this kind of bodybuilding figure.

The other thing to note is that at the time of his rise, the development of camera technology [was also occurring]. Sandow was the first human subject captured in a motion picture. All of this technology allowed his figure to be seen as aspirational. In the late 1800s, camping became a kind of noble pursuit.

Exactly. As industrialization happens, and people move to cities, and they’re surrounded by smog-filled air and polluting factories, chained to a desk writing all day, they start romanticizing the outdoors in a way that was not natural or not obvious to people who previously worked in agriculture. If you’re working in agriculture, this is your life. But now you’re sitting at a desk surrounded by smog in the city. You start thinking of the outdoors as a place to prove manhood and virtue, where you could go and reconnect to your spiritual manhood self, and you could do these things to prove that you’re a man.

Teddy Roosevelt had this buckskin suit, and that at the time symbolized virtue, because the idea was that you could go out into the wild, kill an animal, skin it, tan its skin into leather, and then fashion this bespoke garment essentially. There were guides at the time for how to be an outdoorsman; they had instructions on how to create a buckskin suit.

The reality is that almost all men who wore the buckskin suit actually bought their clothes. They bought them from indigenous women who actually did all of this work, but still they got to wear it as valor. Rachel Gross wrote a brilliant book on this called Shopping All the Way to the Woods, and it’s about the creation of the outdoor identity through consumption.

It’s also notable that at the time when white men put on the fringe buckskin suit, it symbolized skillfulness, even though you bought it really . . . it symbolized a kind of ruggedness, masculinity, virtue, skills, reconnecting to the earth. But at the same time, Native Americans were being stripped of this type of garb because the same clothes on them were coded as primitive backwardness. Uncivilized. They were pushed into schools and then forced to wear different types of clothes because the clothes read differently to other people on them than on a white person going out into the woods.

Again, our clothing choices aren’t just random. They rest on the shifting plates of politics, economics, and technology.

The third section of that essay was about the 1970s and about the bodybuilding movement in California, how bodybuilding became a kind of popular sport. Then people in that California movement: this is the growth of Gold’s Gym, the release of the film Pumping Iron, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who saw his fame catapult from Pumping Iron into Hollywood where he was also met with Sylvester Stallone, these hulking figures. Their figures were put into action films as stand-ins for or representations of masculinity, patriotism, heroism, every kind of virtue you can think of.

Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger naked, but not naked — so you think of this very broad-shouldered [person with a] very tapered waist and these kind of curved-top, columnar legs. That became the silhouette of Armani in the 1980s, the power suit.

The power suit was basically the bodybuilder form in worsted cloth. It was worn by New York financiers, power brokers, this kind of moneyed elite. The best representation of that in popular culture, even though the film came out [in 2000], was Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, which obviously takes place in the ’80s.

Patrick Bateman is very much that kind of character, very much [into] self-optimization, using aesthetics as an expression of status. There’s a scene in there that everyone knows, the business card scene. As they’re sliding around business cards and comparing them, there’s the inner dialogue of Patrick Bateman. The key to that scene is understanding that he is not interested in graphic design for its own sake. He’s not like, “Oh, that’s so interesting that you use this font and spacing.” He’s using aesthetics as a proxy for status. Since he sees himself as the alpha male, he expects that his business card will be graphically or aesthetically the best.

That is the key difference in understanding the alpha-male aesthetic: you can find people who are interested in aesthetics because they’re just interested in aesthetics, and then you can find people who are interested in aesthetics insofar as they assert power or hierarchy over other people. That’s distinct, because your key interest is now no longer aesthetics. Your key interest is status. That’s what defines Bateman.

Then [in the essay,] in the early 2000s, I moved into the rise of the metrosexual. Anyone who was even moderately interested in clothes twenty years ago will know this history very well. As Tom Wolfe noted in the “The Secret Vice,” men have a very uncomfortable relationship with clothing. If you signal that you know too much about clothes or you’re too interested in clothes, people start questioning your gender and sexuality. The key of the rise of the metrosexual in the early 2000s was that designers such as Hedi Slimane, Thom Browne, and Raf Simons shrunk men’s clothes to signal both a kind of European youthful cool but also this kind of androgyny, because in the 1990s the masculine archetype was this big suit, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone kind of figure. So a lot of men’s clothes were really big and baggy at that time.

In the early 2000s, as Slimane and Simons and Browne shrunk men’s silhouettes, that kind of silhouette read as effete and androgynous, and this is directly referenced in some of their interviews. Raf Simons had noted that he shrank men’s silhouettes because he did not identify with the brawny American in fashion ads, and in a 2015 interview with Yahoo!, Hedi Slimane said that he shrank men’s clothes because he wanted to create a more androgynous kind of silhouette that he thought was worth celebrating.

This new figure who was mainly in San Francisco and New York — this type was into indie rock, the Strokes, skinny jeans, threadbare tees. This is the rise of the hipster skinny jeans; there were basically two versions of it. There was the designer version because, remember, this is still, we’re talking like, cutting-edge designer clothing, which was Hedi Slimane’s Dior 17-centimeter, 19-centimeter jeans. The centimeter number references the leg opening, so they’re super small. You could buy the Dior jeans, which were crazy expensive at the time. Or, what many men who couldn’t afford the designer jeans did was raid the women’s aisle, because there were no skinny jeans for men. Which was a move that Levi’s celebrated in 2011 when they released their ex-girlfriend jeans but marketed toward men to commemorate this time.

But over time, that skinny silhouette started to lose its gender ambiguity and cutting-edge-ness. The rise of Mad Men, J.Crew introducing slim fit into everyday offices — all of this started becoming more mainstream. GQ would write about how the shoulder seam has to sit on your shoulder bone and the pants have to taper a certain way, and that if they don’t, if there’s any excess material, you’re sloppy or lazy or out of touch or old. To be seen as good, you basically had to dress in slim-fit clothing. Over time, it became less about gender ambiguity, less metrosexual, and more just like, this is how you’re supposed to dress.

The very last section of that [essay] is talking about how, in parallel to this kind of metrosexual history, you have what I think are the seeds of this manosphere culture online. In the early 2000s, there was a guy [who wrote a book] titled The Game, all this stuff about how to sleep with women by essentially gaming. . . . There was “negging,” creating some kind of insecurity in them by saying something negative and [making them want] your approval.

What was peacocking?

There’s so much stuff in there that’s so amazing. I think that was an early part of [manosphere culture]. Bodybuilding forums were not necessarily toxic or anything, but there was a part of some of that in those forums. There were people who then transitioned from bodybuilding to how to use these techniques to optimize your lifestyle. There was cold plunging before working out. Right now, there’s a challenge where you’re supposed to self-optimize for seventy-two days by going through this program. There’s an ecosystem where all of this is now sitting. In that context, you can understand that what was originally coded as metrosexual then became mainstream.

When you see these [manosphere] figures show up on whatever platform you’re on, whether it’s Twitter or TikTok or Instagram, these are performers. These are businesspeople; they’re selling a product. They’re hoping they’re doing something that will make you pause during your quick scroll, and you’ll watch them, and you’ll either be outraged or you’ll be interested. You will pause, and you may visit their page, and in the bio there’s like, “Click ‘Like’ and subscribe,” or “Buy this coaching program. Buy this supplement. Try my course,” blah blah blah — revenue systems to bring in money.

This is a performer, and that performer is pulling on histories that you may not even be aware of. Going back to what we talked about earlier, why is it that a navy suit looks right with a white shirt and black oxfords? That’s because the history of London finance in the early twentieth century, and you were probably not alive at that point, and you may not even be aware of that history. But it will look right to you, in the same way that we are currently using a language that is legible to everyone listening, even though we were not around when this language was first created. It’s just how language works.

So this group of manosphere [influencers] pulls on a lot of this history of Eugen Sandow, of the 1970 bodybuilders, of Patrick Bateman, of the slim-fit clothes that are now slim-fit not to signal gender ambiguity but to assert traditional gender norms. Because the point of what they’re selling is this ripped body, the idea of self-optimization. If you look at Schwarzenegger in the 1980s and ’90s, he wore baggy clothes. But today, baggy clothes does not signal manhood as it did in the ’80s and ’90s. It signals an idea for sloppiness for most people, so slim-fit clothes allow people like Andrew Tate to go, “Look at how ripped my body is. Look at the fast car I drive. Look at the women I get. Therefore, subscribe to whatever coaching program I offer.”

This comes at a time when we are having all of these conversations about Lil Nas X wearing dresses and all these conversations about what it is to be a man. There’s another section that got cut from my essay, which was in that 1970s part, about second-wave feminism.

There were some men who looked at the second-wave feminists and they said, I recognize that these gender norms are confining and restricting for you, and I can also see how men are also restricted and oppressed by gender norms. Therefore, by breaking down gender norms, I see my liberation and your liberation [being realized].” There was a section of men like that. There was also a section of men who said, second-wave feminists are destroying the family unit, and we have to talk about no-fault divorce and men’s rights.

If second-wave feminism never happened, then men wouldn’t have had that conversation. That conversation lives in the shadow of second-wave feminism. In the same sense, the manosphere lives in the shadow of the fact that we’re now having discussions of trans rights, masculinity, women’s rights, gender performance, all of this stuff. And by cherry-picking from these histories, they create an idea of what it means to be traditionally masculine. Again, if you go back to the early 1800s, Andrew Tate would be considered, like — I’m not passing judgment in terms of class — but he would be judged as a low-class laborer, based on his physique. That would not be aspirational.