A crop of surprisingly non-terrible new clothing-related books has given the lie to my earlier direness about style writing. Foremost among these pop rocks for the jaded palate is Fuck
Yeah Menswear: Bespoke Knowledge for the Crispy Gentleman, the book version of the notorious tumblr site fuckyeahmenswear, edited by Kevin Burrows and Lawrence Schlossman. To change analogies in mid-stream, this book is, as Pauline Kael wrote of the first Star Wars in 1977, “like getting a box
of Cracker Jack which is all prizes.”
I confess that, not having read fuckyeahmenswear’s tumblr, I may be lacking in crispiness, whatever that is. But unlike the publication of the I Can Has Cheezburger book, this book does not inspire the reader with embarrassment for its source. Reading Fuck Yeah Menswear the book mixes the flush of self-recognition with the novelty of seeing various internet tropes and memes committed to print.
Interest in men’s fashion has become mainstream enough and widespread enough that the rise of a blog satirizing the assorted Internet-sanctified themes and brands making up what’s now known as “#menswear” was inevitable. I for one feel lucky that fuckyeahmenswear does it so sharply and well, though. Still, one needn’t be familiar with the #menswear world to recognize,
laugh or cringe with each new page of this book.
Fuck Yeah Menswear includes essays on men’s fashion touchstones such as the importance of denim or the rise of the heritage brand, along with sections on Internet men’s style archetypes, and guides to the preferred #menswear brands, supposed essential men’s garments and the hierarchy of labels
for each article of a man’s wardrobe. Each of these has its epic moments: the archetype section skewers each subculture, from the preps and their joyless cousins the trads (who I had still
held out hope might turn out to be someone’s elaborate online joke) to the goth ninja (I laughed out loud, one of my best e-friends is a goth ninja of the Fūma clan). The guide to essentials lands a masterful strike of literary dim mak in hitting each of the essential items of clothing with a tongue-in-cheek preciosity that’ll make your toes curl; and I had to retrain my facial muscles to get the smirk off my face after learning that the hierarchy guide (from “wealth” to “baller” to “poor”) dismisses Brooks Brothers (for shirts), J. Crew
(trousers) and Allen Edmonds (shoes) as “poor.” For in the solipsistic, echoing virtual world of today’s postmodern
Walter Mittys these classifications take on extra relevance and resonance as some of the most frequently mentioned, coveted and most of all, derided brands.
Derision is one of the low-denomination currencies of Internet forums: easy to acquire and to wield based on hearsay, received wisdom, or a simple willingness to outspend one’s virtual peers for more aspirational, more exclusive, labels. And in capturing that derision, Fuck Yeah Menswear shines most of all outside these organized sections, in the interspersed photos of #menswear preciosity with accompanying poetic, creatively imagined inner monologues, soliloquies or dialogues glistening with put-downs, name-checking and nicknaming celebrities and status brands that are generally meaningless to people outside the #menswear community (Boglioli, Nick Wooster, Brunello Cucinelli, the Sartorialist…).
Elaborately lauded though they are, there’s no point in or need for quibbling with the particular brands Fuck Yeah Menswear ranks and celebrates. Whether, for instance, the “wealth” suit should be “Savile Row Bespoke” and not a maker prized by the Internet for being even rarer and more expensive like Liverano or
Rubinacci bespoke is beside the point. Fuck Yeah Menswear records that certain fanatic, thoughtless received wisdom known as groupthink, presumptions and prejudices that accrete based on thirdhand repetition and that lack of empiricism that means that all experience, now, is becoming virtual. So Fuck
Yeah Menswear’s rogues gallery of favorite shops will ring true with many readers even if we have never been to Atlanta and Sid Mashburn or to New Haven and J. Press: punters have already
visited all of these new opium dens in the pipe dreams of forum threads, magazine articles and blog reviews.
Carefully contrived for an imagined and virtual public of potential fashion bloggers and forum participants and throwing out intentionally obscurantist keywords like “sprezz” and “trad,” Fuck Yeah Menswear brings out the self-involved, incestuous cultishness of internet men’s clothing subcultures despite their uneasy balkanization of the past decade, Fuck Yeah Menswear is at its best arrested on these images, their subjects apparently unaware of the evanescence of their own interest (surely interest men’s clothing will become uncool again soon now that everyone is talking about it and I can go back to being mildly eccentric again), unpacking superficiality for the yearning that we all seek for the acceptance of a broader community that understands and shares our tastes, along with the status cravings most of us won’t admit to.
Words by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.