Meet the Man You’ll Want to Be

Donning 20 looks that matter from the Fall/Winter 2024 menswear collections

With another month of men’s fashion shows in the books, SSENSE’s Head of Creative and Content Thom Bettridge took to the streets of Paris with 20 of the most fascinating looks pilfered from the runways, showrooms, and presentations. Here’s his report on the future of men’s ready-to-wear.

Since the series finale of , menswear day traders have been short selling quiet luxury. But unlike GameStop, the annoyingly viral ethos just won’t go bust. Even in my own head as I think about what FW24 holds for dudes everywhere, the term still uniquely describes the moment.I realized in Paris that quiet luxury reminds me of “the end of history.” The latter phrase was coined in 1989 by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama to describe the world after the Cold War. “The end of history” and Fukuyama have been derided mercilessly ever since because, well, history didn’t end after 1989. But I always admired for its spunk, and because it clearly captured a feeling that was very much present. In that sense, both quiet luxury and “the end of history” also remind me of normcore, another idea that aged badly yet felt palpable in the air when it was coined. In 1989, we thought history was over. In 2013, we thought dressing like Jerry Seinfeld was transgressive. In 2023, we thought luxury might actually be about being rich. Those kinds of genies don’t go back in the bottle.The thing about understatement is that it can come in many forms. The idiosyncrasies are what make it expensive. The regular exacts its revenge in the details, in the places where the normal is actually a bit weird. Maybe that comes in the form of a peach-colored AURALEE overshirt that’s not quite a button-down, not quite a knit polo, not quite a sweater, and yet somehow all three. Or through the slight flair in a trouser from The Row, paired with a cardigan packing an inexplicably deep V. The regular also plays its little game by showing up where you least expect it, like in the tailoring-focused runway debut of never-regular 032c. A perfect trench made of BDSM leather—maybe that’s the real quiet luxury.

“We heard you liked clothes, so we put clothes on your clothes,” was the goofy ’90s kid joke I kept cracking to myself as I perused the FW24 showrooms. But in all seriousness, a couple things you need to know about layering:It almost always looks great.It’s the best way to keep warm.It works best without logic.To explain my third point, take this gray ensemble from Rier, a darling of menswear dudes far and wide this season. This sweater doesn’t sweater if the vest is a normal length. The pants don’t pant if they’re not actually a skirt. And all the clothes aren’t clothing if you don’t throw a blanket on it. Layering is a bit like quantum physics—if you get what’s going on, you’re likely oversimplifying.Elsewhere we saw contributions to the canon by the maestros at LEMAIRE and HOMME PLISSÉ ISSEY MIYAKE. In the case of both brands, layering is a testament to the power of brand loyalty. Why do so many people commit to a closet full of LEMAIRE or ISSEY? Because wearing a ton of it at once never fails.

Whenever I spend an extended period of time looking at garments, my appreciation for denim deepens. Lots of clothes are fun and all, but nothing quite manages to be sexy, flexible, practical, and everything else you want in your life all at once quite like the humble jean. The closing look of Junya Watanabe’s brilliant FW24 menswear collection was a walking parable of this concept: a tailed dinner jacket befit for an orchestra conductor that morphs downward into panels of faded black denim. The tuxedo and the jean existing in perfect harmony—it’s like watching two Platonic ideals collide.In other matters of metaphysics, Acne Studios has continued its new habit of printing pictures of jeans onto jeans. The result is like if Richard Prince and Levi Strauss had a love child. Acne poses a conceptual riddle here that I cannot stop toying with: We love denim because it bears the truth of what we do on its surface, but we also want those marks instantly without ever having to live through them. Eckhaus Latta’s purplish, greenish washed dungarees unzip in half at the crotch. That’s all you need to know about them.

What’s the difference between a pattern and a trend? Maybe it’s that a trend feels like it’s doing something, whereas patterns don’t in any particular direction. Two patterns I noticed in the menswear collections that don’t feel like trends: giant faux-fur coats and tops with cats on them. But if you take these two patterns together, the inklings of a trend begin to coagulate: an emergent recoupling with kitsch, a humanist desire to feel fuzzy in a cruel world, a subversion of masculine youth via its granny opposite. Welcome to kittycore.

I guess what really bothers me about quiet luxury is the way in which the concept has such a tight grip over this moment while so falsely embodying it. We live in loud times. We live in broke times. The desire to be neither comes from a place of anxiety, not from a place of style or creativity. Fashion at its worst serves as nostalgia for something that never happened. At its best, it invents things and heightens reality. This dial can be turned hard, or it can be a gentle tweak like the enlarged tassels on JW Anderson’s new loafers. Here, the surreal points to the real, in this case the decorative frivolity of a tassel in the first place. Why not make it huge? As the great surrealist André Breton once said, “The imaginary tends to become real.”In other places this season, you saw contemporary surrealist masters brewing up what they do best. Kiko Kostadinov brought bright colors and fabric crowns into his universe of alien tailoring, while Rick Owens invited guests into his actual home, and proposed silhouettes that literally breathed air into the grotesque proportions of our time. Ideas like these are why we search for fashion amongst all the clothes.