Insights

The tie and the making of masculine order I had to wear a tie when I first went to school. We all did. Later, when I moved to secondary school, I had to wear a different one. I understood what the other parts of the uniform were for. A jumper kept you warm. A coat was for bad weather. Trousers and a shirt covered the body. But the tie felt different. Even then, it wasn’t obvious what function it served. It was clear, though, that it mattered. Teachers corrected it. You were t

Before I knew anything about class, status, or style, I knew this: if you wanted to enter a world, you had to be dressed for it. That was the lesson Mr Benn taught me. Every episode began with the same uniform of respectable English stability: jacket, tie, bowler hat, striped trousers. He then stepped into the fancy-dress shop, changed clothes, and found himself somewhere else entirely. A cowboy, a spaceman, a diver, a hunter: the outfit changed, and so did the world. Looking

Most people misread Masonic regalia as decorative, as a ceremonial display of aprons, collars, and metal jewels, even though each element has a specific function. What appears ornamental is in fact organised information that fixes meaning through role, rank, and position, turning dress into a system. Though I am not a Freemason, it is the clarity of that system that fascinates me. To read Masonic dress, you start with the common ground. In English Craft Freemasonry, that mean

Digital ID promises convenience, but what it normalises is permanent readiness for inspection. Digital systems are beginning to demand what menswear long helped manage: that the body arrive already sorted. In many of the spaces that organise everyday life, clothing has never simply covered the body; it has made the person easier to place. It signals competence, threat, seriousness, respectability, compliance, often before a word is spoken. It grants ease to some and friction

By the time people started talking about Pep Guardiola’s trousers, the easy story had already been written. The Our Legacy shirt had been identified, priced, and circulated; the Wembley rigout scrutinised, its wider, softer silhouette read as part of the same shift. The Guardian saw liberation and legacy. GQ saw a manager becoming unexpectedly cool. All of that makes sense. It also misses the more interesting point, because it assumes Guardiola’s clothes have only recently be

Look at these men. Who are they? Safe. Successful. Respectable. The sort who own restaurants, deal in property, or sell sports cars. Men who would be waved through rather than stopped. That judgement arrived quickly, almost before it registered as judgement. Before you had really taken in the jackets, the scarves, the knitwear. Before you knew anything about them at all, you had already placed them. That moment is the subject of Exactitudes , the long-running photographic pro

Most retrospectives are really stories about change: how an image evolved, how a look shifted, how a public self was remade. Pet Shop Boys Volume , Thames & Hudson’s new survey of the group’s visual work from 1984 to 2024, is more interesting for the opposite reason. It shows what held firm. Across forty years of output, the Pet Shop Boys kept returning to the same problem: how to remain visible in public without becoming fully available. Their answer lay in two parallel syst

Dress, class and the problem of respectable crime Prisoners, North Shields Police Court, 1902 to 1916. Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums. Look closely at these early twentieth-century police portraits and the surprise is not the crime, but the clothing. The men arrested for offences such as larceny appear before the camera dressed in collars, ties, jackets and hats, wearing the visual language of propriety and respectability. That is the contradiction at the centre of these imag

Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren and the Class Politics of Art School Vivienne Westwood enrolled at Harrow School of Art in April 1958. She left after one term. That fact is usually told as temperament, boredom, or proto-rebellion. In reality, it was an institutional outcome. Harrow sorted students, and she was sorted out. Harrow School of Art Prospectus, 1957–58. Courtesy University of Westminster Archive. The myth of the rebellious art-school dropout obscures the fact tha

Last Saturday I queued for ninety minutes to get into a pub. Utopia, by Trackie McLeod, rebuilt a working men’s club inside Factory International, Manchester’s major contemporary arts institution. It ran as a functioning bar. Pints were pulled. Music played. There was a dartboard, a fruit machine, even a karaoke screen. It behaved like a pub; the exhibition operated through it. The Haçienda once promised a utopian space, where music and dress could reorganise class and cultur

Released as part of Supreme’s A/W2016 season, this red clay brick sold out immediately and entered resale circulation within hours. Its value multiplied rapidly, despite having no use as clothing and no functional purpose beyond being recognised. Menswear is often described as clothing. In practice, it operates as a system that organises value, recognition, circulation, and belonging. Garments are one output of that system, not its foundation. The brick exposes this by elimin

It looks like an official British Army recruitment poster. It isn’t. It’s a spoof, designed in the style of a lab diagram, using the visual language of instruction and assessment. It asks a single question in block capitals: Artwork by Rango, ALLYNESS Ltd. Below it, a line drawing of a soldier stands annotated like an anatomy chart. Lid. Grid. Arm size. Piss tank size. A human eye hovers to one side, labelled: What’s this fella all about? At the bottom, the Army’s official s

Last week’s essay traced how early Burberry treated weather as a problem of governance rather than image. Performance was not assumed. It was earned through repeated exposure. Authority accumulated slowly, through continuity under pressure. Clothing proved itself by stabilising bodies over time. This essay begins where that logic breaks down. Released late last year, this Moncler advert features Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, actors whose authority no longer depends on demonst

Burberry wasn’t built on fashion, it was built on exposure. Before the trench coat became a symbol, the job was simple: keep bodies operational in weather that could halt work, travel, and command. Weather is not neutral. By the late nineteenth century in Britain, it had become measurable, reportable, and actionable at scale. Through coordinated observation, telegraphic communication, and state infrastructure, weather was reframed as something that could be monitored, anticip

Prada’s Autumn/Winter 2026 menswear show didn’t look new. The clothes arrived scuffed and stained, their surfaces deliberately unsettled. Edges were worn back to expose the material beneath. The collection presented garments not at the beginning of their lives, but staged to appear as if they had already been worn. That appearance matters because real wear is not an effect. It is a record. It accumulates evidence through labour, repetition, constraint, repair and time. Crease

Stability, compliance, repetition Last week I argued that hi-vis is infrastructure, not fashion. It regulates risk, organises behaviour, and keeps systems functioning. That logic does not stop at workwear. It runs through everything that men wear. In schools, gyms, offices, building sites, and barracks, clothing exists to make bodies legible inside systems that depend on predictability. These garments do not ask who you are. They assign what you are for. They reduce friction,

Hi-Vis, Workwear, and the Systems That Make Us Comply The first week back at work always feels slightly brutal. You feel it in your clothes before you feel it anywhere else. The tracksuits, hoodies and dressing gowns that carried us through that strange, suspended week between Christmas and New Year are put away. They are replaced by garments built not for comfort, but for function. Commutes restart. Offices refill. Shops, schools, construction sites and warehouses snap back

New Year’s Day is meant to feel like a reset. The calendar turns, and we are invited to believe that the world has moved forward together, that time has restarted cleanly. That belief only works if time is still shared. When it isn’t, that belief becomes a fiction. For most of our lives, the world has run on a single, shared clock. You felt it without ever needing to name it. Television schedules, working hours, football seasons, deliveries, release dates. Everything happened

Three BSFC stickers parodying British visual culture. At Christmas, men get socks. They’re the safe gift: practical, predictable, almost designed to be dismissed. But Christmas is also the day that “background” clothing becomes visible. Shoes come off. Feet go up. The domestic setting turns the hidden layer into the surface. Which is why it matters that the British Sock Fetish Council emerged in the dead week between Christmas and New Year. In the UK, that stretch is oddly su

On the surfaces men maintain, and what sits beneath You start with a cloth, a tin of polish, and a surface that refuses to shine unless you work for it. Bulling boots is a small, repetitive task often seen as an outdated drill that belongs to the barracks or the parade ground rather than the present day. Yet it is in these smaller rituals that you glimpse how men are shaped. If you want to understand habit, discipline, character, and what remains in the body long after the in