Insights

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

What labour do you endure? What structure do you uphold? What weight do you bear?  Labour Craig Green’s work begins with effort. Labour, for Green, is not the production of clothes but the slow, exacting work of secular belief. From his earliest collections, he has asked what the body can withstand, and how the act of wearing can become an act of endurance. The sculptural forms of his 2012 Central Saint Martin’s show were not props but burdens; structures that made visible th

Adapted from my chapter Palliative Prototypes or Therapeutic Functionality? Examining C.P. Company’s Urban Protection Collection  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Towards the end of the 1990s, both fashion and art became preoccupied with the damaged body. Designers such as Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, and Comme des Garçons mobilised dystopian aesthetics of decay and disintegration, imagining futures in which the human form was no longer stable or secure. At the same time,

How a pair of jeans turned wear into a performance. Twenty years ago, Stone Island released a pair of jeans that came packaged with a set of printed instructions and a small sandpaper glove. The idea was simple: you could age your own denim at home. The instructions told you to place your usual pocket contents inside — keys, wallet, coins — then rub the glove over the raised areas of the fabric to create creases, scuffs, and fading. It was a strange kind of intimacy, as if t

At a glance, the sticker above looks just like one of the football stickers I wrote about last week. The kind that declare loyalty without hesitation, the sort you would expect to find in the toilets of the local Wetherspoons. But look closer: A LOAD OF WANNABEES, DRIPS AND DIVS… THEY’LL PROBABLY PUT THAT ON A STICKER. It borrows the shape and swagger of the older language (right down to the St George’s cross), yet the whole thing collapses the instant you focus on it. Self-d

Most people never notice them. The small vinyl stickers layered on lampposts, stuck on bus shelters or plastered above the piss stones in the pub toilet. But once you start looking, they’re everywhere, a parallel record of football culture that doesn’t appear in official histories or club museums. Over the past decade I’ve been photographing them, documenting a graphic language of belonging, rivalry, and identity. These stickers feature everything from club crests and slogans

In the mid-1990s, two men stood on a Soho street corner watching CCTV cameras swivel overhead. Adam Thorpe and Joe Hunter had just founded Vexed Generation, a label built for a city learning to live under surveillance. Their garments, zipped masks, mesh panels, and layered shells looked less like fashion and more like countermeasures. They weren’t dressing men for attention; they were teaching them how to disappear. London was changing fast. CCTV cameras were spreading across

For the last thirteen years, I’ve been watching people photograph themselves outside the Haçienda Apartments in Manchester. Through the curtains of my window opposite, I’ve quietly captured the moment that they pose beneath the sign, an unseen witness to something that mostly goes unnoticed. At first, I thought it was simple nostalgia; people returning to capture a memory. But over time, as the gestures repeated, I realised it was something else: ritual. Each visit follows th

Next week, Aitor Throup returns to Burnley with his first major retrospective. This exhibition is more than just a showcase of his work. It represents a return to the town where he first faced prejudice and discovered a sense of belonging. Here, resistance evolved from a means of survival into a powerful method. Turf Moor and the Making of Refusal Growing up in Burnley, Aitor Throup encountered hostility and racism that marked him as an outsider. Yet, on the terraces of Turf

Yesterday, CNN asked what happens when extremists wear fashion brands, using Stone Island as its example of how symbols can become contested. The question sounds simple, but it reveals something deeper — how easily fashion absolves itself from the hierarchies it helped create. It assumes brands are neutral until corrupted by bad actors. But fashion isn’t passive. It has always been one of the clearest ways societies express power, class, and control. And when those symbols sl

In the 18th century, the calling card was a symbol of class and access. Copperplate-engraved and elegantly typeset, it served as a small performance of civility, proof that you belonged to a world where reputation was currency. Working-class men did not need such things, and no means to produce them even if they did. Print was expensive, and etiquette was not their language. Two hundred years later, the photocopier changed that. A machine built for bureaucracy and business be

Last week’s Dior show opened on an off note — or more precisely, three. The soundtrack of a specially commissioned Adam Curtis film began to play, its low piano tones reverberating through the space. Projected onto the giant inverted pyramid, they hung like a warning, signalling that something beneath Dior’s polished surface was already starting to come apart.

Dress codes are never about clothes — they are about control. No hats. No hoodies. No sunglasses.” Shopwindow, October 2025. How we dress...

Twenty-six years later, the razor blade dress returns — not on the catwalk, but in the Barbican’s new exhibition Dirty Looks: Desire and...