Men's Fashion, the Suit, and the Loss of Colour: The Quiet Uniform

Cold open

The second: a pair of sneakers. A limited “drop,” a few thousand made, gone in ninety seconds online — then resold for multiples of retail. The most coveted grails trade hands for the price of a used car; the global sneaker resale market alone is projected to reach roughly $30 billion by 2030.^[16] Grown men set phone alarms, write bots, and queue overnight for shoes they may never wear.^[14]

That tension — between the man who must not be seen to care, and the man who cares enormously — is the entire drama of men's fashion. And it has a precise historical origin, a deep psychology, and a vast and very specific money machine behind it. This is the story of how men learned to dress in a uniform of sober restraint, who got rich from it, and why, right now, the colour is bleeding back in.

When men were the peacocks

For the overwhelming majority of recorded history, the most extravagantly dressed person in the room was a man.^[5] Look at the European court from the Renaissance through the 1700s and you'll find elite men in silk and velvet, drenched in lace, ribbons, embroidery, pearls and bows.

The logic was simple and unembarrassed: lavish, impractical, colourful dress advertised that you did not need to work. It is exactly what the economist Thorstein Veblen would later name conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption — display whose entire purpose is to prove you are above labour.^[7] Heels you can't run in, lace that ruins if you labour, colours that fade and must be replaced — every element broadcast leisure, wealth and rank. For an aristocratic man, being beautiful was being powerful.

There was no contradiction to manage. For most of history, the man was the colourful one. The peacock was the point.

— the world before the suit

The Great Renunciation

Then, in the space of a couple of generations around the turn of the 19th century, it all stopped. Elite Western men abruptly abandoned bright colour, ornament, jewellery, heels and visual variety — and retreated into dark, sober, plain cloth, where the only permitted distinctions were cut and fabric quality. Colour, decoration and display were handed over almost entirely to women, where they have largely remained ever since.

Why did it happen? Historians point to a convergence of forces, and Flügel's tidy explanation has been challenged. But the main drivers are clear enough.

• revolutionThe Enlightenment and the French Revolution discredited aristocratic excess. After heads literally rolled, looking like a pampered noble became dangerous, then merely distasteful. Sober dress signalled you were a citizen, not a parasite.
• industryThe Industrial Revolution elevated a new ideal of manhood: the serious, productive, self-made man of business — caricatured as a sombre figure in head-to-toe black. Men now dressed to look capable and trustworthy, not idle and ornamental.^[3]
• masculinityA new definition of masculinity congealed around restraint, discipline and utility. Decoration became coded as feminine — a coding so durable that, even today, a man in colour and pattern can still be met with nervous mockery.^[11]

Men didn't lose interest in clothing. They redefined caring about it as caring about getting it right — invisibly — rather than standing out.

— the foundational event

Brummell invents the suit

Men's fashion got its prophet in George “Beau” Brummell (1778–1840) — a Regency dandy, ex-military officer and intimate friend of the Prince Regent.^[8] In an age that still associated grandeur with frills and powdered wigs, Brummell did something quietly revolutionary.

• the cutHe rejected ornament entirely for an immaculately cut dark wool coat, buff trousers, a crisp white shirt, a perfectly tied cravat and polished boots — all in an air of studied, effortless understatement.
• the hygieneHe evangelised daily bathing and clean linen in an era when neither was assumed — grooming as a status signal in itself.
• the obsessionHis exacting demands on his tailors — the perfect shoulder line, the flawless drape of a sleeve, the roll of a lapel — are the direct ancestors of the modern suit.

His genius was the invention of a new kind of status signal: elegance through restraint. Brummell proved that a man could dominate a room not by wearing the most, but by wearing the most perfectly judged — that refinement, fit and discipline could out-rank mere expense.^[2] A contemporary said he “made the black coat the uniform of every gentleman, stripping away the colour and leaving behind the elegance of simplicity.”

Savile Row's secret grammar

Brummell's revolution needed a factory, and it found one on a single short street in Mayfair: Savile Row. As officers returned from the Napoleonic Wars and the new monied class swelled, tailors clustered there to serve them, and the area became the global capital of bespoke tailoring — garments cut and built by hand, individually, through repeated fittings, for one specific body. A pivotal moment came around 1860 when Henry Poole & Co. created the dinner jacket for the Prince of Wales.

Savile Row reveals the deep grammar of post-Renunciation menswear. Once colour and ornament were forbidden, status had to relocate somewhere — and it relocated into things only an expert eye can read.^[4]

• the lapelThe hand-rolled lapel and the precise line of the shoulder — the single hardest thing for a tailor to get right, and the first thing a connoisseur looks at.
• the cuffWorking “surgeon's” cuff buttons that actually unbutton — a tiny, near-invisible tell of a hand-finished garment.
• the chestA full floating canvas inside the jacket rather than glued fusing — invisible from outside, but it changes how the cloth moves on the body for decades.
• the clothThe weight, weave and mill of the fabric — a language of its own, legible only to those who already speak it.

The peacock's loud display became the gentleman's coded whisper. But it was still display — it just required a trained ear.

— the connoisseur's game

Uniform & rebellion

If the 19th century established the sober male uniform, the 20th century spent a hundred years testing it to destruction. The suit became the universal male armour — worn from boardroom to wedding to funeral, with a man's clothing decisions largely made for him by an iron grid of dress codes. Then came the cracks: each one a subculture using clothing as a flag of rebellion.

• workwearDenim jeans, born as miners' workwear in 1873, were rebranded by Hollywood, James Dean and Marlon Brando into the global symbol of youthful male rebellion — the first garment a man wore to reject the establishment rather than join it.
• the teenagerPost-war prosperity invented the affluent young male consumer. Teddy Boys, Mods, rockers, hippies, punks, skinheads and the B-boys of early hip-hop each weaponised menswear into tribal identity.
• sportswearThe tracksuit, the trainer and the hoodie — designed for athletes — migrated into everyday male dress, planting the seed of the casualisation that would eventually swallow the suit whole.

In menswear the trickle ran heavily upward — from the street and the working class to the centre — long before luxury would admit it.

— the engine of male style

This inverts the classic account. Georg Simmel's century-old model had fashion trickling down — elites adopt a style, the masses imitate it, the elites move on to stay distinct.^[9] Men's twentieth-century style mostly ran the other way: the most powerful new codes were minted at the bottom — workwear, sportswear, the uniforms of poor and marginalised young men — and travelled up, until the boardroom and the runway were quoting the corner. Hold onto that direction; it is the whole mechanism behind the sneaker, and behind the colour now bleeding back.

What the uniform does

Mechanism one · The suit really does change the man

Most men have felt the cruder version of this without a lab. Think of the first time a jacket actually fit — not bought off a sagging rack but cut, or at least altered, to the body. The shoulders stop a half-inch early; the waist comes in; suddenly there is a line from neck to hem that was never there before. Men who have spent their lives insisting they “don't care about clothes” go quiet in front of that mirror, then stand up straighter. The garment hasn't just changed how they look. It has, for a moment, changed who they take themselves to be. That small, almost embarrassing jolt is the entire psychological engine the rest of this section is about.

Mechanism two · The masculine double-bind

Here's the mechanism unique to men, and it descends directly from the Great Renunciation. Western masculinity coded overt interest in one's own appearance as unmanly — vain, frivolous, feminine.^[11] Yet men are still judged relentlessly on how they look. This produces a peculiar double-bind: a man is expected to look good while appearing not to have tried. “Effortless” is the highest male style compliment precisely because effort itself is suspect.

You can watch the double-bind operate in tiny everyday tells. The man who spends twenty minutes engineering hair to look like he just rolled out of bed. The “oh, this old thing,” deflecting a compliment on a jacket he agonised over for a week. The friend who would be mortified to be called vain but has read four forum threads on the exact patina of a $500 boot. None of them lack the desire to be admired for how they look. They lack permission to admit it — so the desire goes underground and comes back up wearing a hard hat.

Mechanism three · The narrow lane and the depth of obsession

Because the acceptable range of male dress is so narrow, men's fashion interest often channels into depth rather than breadth. Denied the whole rainbow, men go deep: the provenance of a watch movement, the welt construction of a Goodyear shoe, the exact fade of selvedge denim, the lore of a sneaker colourway.^[14] The man who'd never call himself “into fashion” can hold forth for an hour on the correct break of a trouser hem. That, too, is fashion — just wearing the disguise of expertise.

The other side · In defence of the uniform

It would be too easy to treat the whole thing as repression to be thrown off. There is a real case for the quiet uniform, and honesty requires making it.

The suit goes global

The sober suit was a European invention, but it conquered the planet. Through the British Empire, American economic power and the globalisation of business, the Western lounge suit became the near-universal uniform of male authority — worn by politicians and officials from Tokyo to Lagos to São Paulo, very often displacing rich local traditions of male dress. To “dress seriously” as a man almost anywhere on Earth came to mean dressing like a 19th-century Englishman.

And the making moved East and South. Production concentrated overwhelmingly in Asia — China alone close to 45% of global apparel — while the fastest-growing markets for men's clothing are now also in Asia and the global South.^[17] The European world that invented the suit is now just one node in a planet-spanning web.

Follow the money

The men's-fashion economy is large, fast-growing and structured very differently from the female market. Global menswear was valued somewhere in the region of $590–610 billion in 2024, with credible forecasts pointing toward roughly $920 billion to $1.2 trillion within the next 6–10 years.^[17] Crucially, menswear has often grown faster than womenswear in recent years — the “men don't shop” wisdom is now badly out of date.

The sneaker economy

The single biggest shift in modern menswear has a name: casualisation. And its emperor is the sneaker. The hard data is stark: the men's suit market fell by over 50% during the pandemic, and while it has partially rebounded, the trend of decades is unmistakable — the suit has been dethroned as the default of male dress. In its place: athleisure (nearly 20% of the menswear market), loungewear, “performance” office fabrics, and above all sneakers and streetwear.

The culture is the remarkable part. Limited “drops,” artificial scarcity, hype, and a resale market headed for ~$30 billion by 2030 turned shoes into simultaneously a status signal, a subcultural passport and a financial asset.^{[14], [16]} Streetwear's whole model — scarcity-driven drops, brand collaborations, resale markups frequently exceeding 150–250% — is the trickle-up engine and the belong-versus-stand-out psychology fused into a business model, and it skews heavily male.

A man who would never wear a bright jacket will happily wear a screaming-orange limited-edition trainer — because it's “a sneaker,” not “fashion.” The peacock came back wearing running shoes.

— the Renunciation, reversing on male terms

Who actually gets paid

Menswear sits inside the same global apparel supply chain as everything else, and the same uncomfortable arithmetic applies. The people who physically make the clothing receive the smallest slice by far.

The peacock returns

The Great Masculine Renunciation is genuinely loosening, and it's worth ending on, because it's happening right now. Luxury houses put men in colour, pattern, jewellery, “skirts” and overt ornament. Harry Styles, A$AP Rocky, Bad Bunny and Timothée Chalamet wear pearls, nail varnish and vivid tailoring — and are celebrated, not mocked, for it. Gen Z increasingly treats the old gendered colour-coding as arbitrary, and gender-neutral lines are a fast-growing share of new collections.

Who is actually driving this · Not the runway — the margins

It matters who is doing the loosening, because it isn't, in the main, the heirs of Savile Row. The pressure comes from below and from the edges. From Gen Z, who poll dramatically less attached to rigid gender norms than their fathers and treat a painted nail as a styling choice, not a confession. From musicians and athletes — the NBA pre-game “tunnel walk” has quietly become one of the most-watched menswear runways on Earth, and it is overwhelmingly young Black men setting its terms. From social platforms where a teenager in a small town can find, and be rewarded for, a louder self than his hometown would have allowed. The movement is real, but its engine is the same trickle-up that minted denim and the sneaker — the centre is being dressed by the margin again.

It is, in effect, a slow un-renunciation — men reclaiming the colour, decoration and display they handed over around 1800.

— the peacock tests his wings

The uniform was always a choice

Look down at what you're wearing, if you're a man, or at the men around you. The navy, the grey, the denim, the white sneaker, the “investment” watch, the deliberately plain tee — it can feel like the natural, neutral, default way for a man to dress. But none of it is natural. Every bit of it is the inheritance of a specific, datable cultural decision: enforced by Brummell, manufactured on Savile Row, exported across an empire, democratised into the suit, rebelled against by a century of subcultures, and now monetised by a near-trillion-dollar machine.

The “neutral” male wardrobe is one of the most successful pieces of cultural engineering in history — so successful that men mistake it for having no style at all.

— the uniform was always a choice

The most interesting thing happening in menswear isn't a trend; it's men noticing the cage. Understanding that the quiet uniform was a choice — made for reasons that may no longer apply — is what lets a man decide, for the first time in two hundred years, whether to keep wearing it.

And noticing doesn't oblige anyone to abandon it. A man can look at the navy and the grey and the plain white tee, understand exactly where they came from and what they were for, and still choose them — now as a preference rather than a reflex. That is the whole difference, and it is not small. Brummell handed men a uniform and called it freedom from the peacock's vulgarity. Two centuries on, the freedom worth having is the one he never offered: not the uniform, and not its opposite, but the knowledge that it was a costume all along — and that the man inside it gets to pick. That awareness is the one thing neither the suit, the sneaker, nor the cologne can sell him.

References

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2. A. Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. New York, NY, USA: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
3. D. Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850. Berkeley, CA, USA: Univ. of California Press, 2002.
4. C. Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester Univ. Press, 1999.
5. C. McDowell, The Man of Fashion: Peacock Males and Perfect Gentlemen. London, U.K.: Thames & Hudson, 1997.
6. E. Semmelhack, Standing Tall: The Curious History of Men in Heels. Toronto, ON, Canada: Bata Shoe Museum, 2015.
7. T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York, NY, USA: Macmillan, 1899.
8. I. Kelly, Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style. New York, NY, USA: Free Press, 2006.
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13. W. D. Marx, Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. New York, NY, USA: Basic Books, 2015.
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15. “Virgil Abloh,” Encyclopædia Britannica. Accessed: Jun. 6, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Virgil-Abloh
16. Market Data Forecast, “Sneakers market size, share and trends report,” Hyderabad, India, 2024.
17. Grand View Research, “Men's apparel market size, share & trends analysis report,” San Francisco, CA, USA, 2024.
18. LVMH, “2024 annual results,” LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, Paris, France, Jan. 2025.
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21. Fair Labor Association, “Toward fair compensation in Bangladesh: Insights on closing the wage gap,” Washington, DC, USA, 2018.
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