One of the small ironies of life in postindustrial America is the renewed popularity of clothing connected to industry and physical labor. Formerly staples of construction yards and factory floors, the brands Dickies and Carhartt have been claimed by a generation of streetwear addicts. Blue-collar staples such as rugged chambray shirts and “chore” jackets can be purchased at niche labels for hundreds of dollars. Surplus military wear and painstaking recreations of the original garments are now sought-after items. Even the names of boutique menswear brands and shops, such as “The Real McCoys” and “Broadway and Sons,” recall a bygone era.
Style was once a clue to the wearer’s socioeconomic status or geographic origins. Workwear, in its various permutations, was meant for work. What is commonly known as “East Coast” or “Ivy Style,” including penny loafers, blue blazers, chinos, and striped ties, was an outgrowth of the postwar economic boom, the GI Bill, and the increasing salience of college education, creating a distinctively American look that survives to this day. British tailoring was defined by the conventions of Savile Row, which favored a more structured approach to suiting than the comparatively laid-back Americans.
Clothes, however, have become detached from geography. These days, one can just as likely find a ranch-inspired denim shirt or Oxford cloth button-down (or OCBD, once the sine qua non of the Ivy look) in Milan or London as in Dallas or Boston. A menswear enthusiast might pair his American-made shirt with a soft-shouldered Italian blazer, benchmade Japanese shoes, and a British club tie.
The godfather of this a la carte approach is Ralph Lauren, whose career both anticipated and shaped the trajectory of modern style. Lauren was not to the manor born — he changed his name from “Lifschitz” before launching the company — but he quickly grasped the appeal of aristocratic leisure. His eponymous brand is best known for gleefully appropriating the iconography of British formalwear and preppy, East Coast Americana. Lauren’s marketing turned an obscure upper-class pastime, polo, into global shorthand for a casual shirt.
But Lauren had broader designs than the prep schools and boardrooms of the Anglosphere. Similar to the early Christian church, the House of Ralph Lauren is highly syncretic. Lauren’s brand borrows extensively from stylistic traditions that often seem in tension with, or even diametrically opposed to, one another. Extreme sports, militaria, ranchwear, and blue-collar style have all been assimilated into his oeuvre. Items from RRL, a western-workwear diffusion line, are considerably more expensive than the OCBDs and repp ties of Lauren’s better known “Polo” brand. After some initial reluctance, the company’s marketing machine has even embraced hip-hop culture.
Lauren’s rise coincides with far-reaching changes in the United States economy. In the 1970s, Ralph Lauren switched from manufacturing clothes to designing and licensing. There are no Ralph Lauren factories in the U.S. producing polo shirts and penny loafers. A global supply chain connects the company’s U.S.-based designers with manufacturers from Slovakia, Italy, and China. Lauren’s insight, that Americana retains its marketing cachet even if you move production offshore, has been embraced by other industries, from consumer electronics to cars. As the menswear writer Derek Guy archly observed, writing about Lauren’s extravagantly rustic Colorado ranch, “One has to wonder how many Native-American-inspired, but made-in-China, RRL shirts one has to sell in order to buy that Native American chief blanket and American flag (both from the 1880s), which decorate the main lodge’s master bedroom.”
Lauren is not an ideological figure, but what little we know about his politics is suggestive. According to a 1986 Time profile, he was an early supporter of Gary Hart, the scandal-prone standard-bearer of the New Democrats. Hart and his successors, notably Bill Clinton, combined market economics and social liberalism into a potent ideological cocktail that would appeal to the same upwardly mobile creatives who embraced Ralph Lauren’s a la carte approach to dressing. Thanks in part to the landscape created by Hart and his heirs, the menswear market, similar to many other sectors of the economy, has become increasingly stratified between cheap, “fast fashion” outlets at the bottom and pricey, boutique options at the top. Retailers that serviced the great American middle are getting squeezed out of the picture.
The recent bankruptcy of Brooks Brothers, the originator of both the OCBD and the ready-to-wear suit, is a case in point. In the mid-20th century, Brooks Brothers pioneered the uniform of prosperous middle management, the so-called “man in the grey flannel suit.” Lauren actually got his start as a salesman at Brooks Brothers. Now, the brand’s future is in doubt, brought low by a combination of relaxed dress codes, a declining American garment industry, online shopping, and the proliferation of pricier alternatives for discerning, upwardly mobile consumers. Among the casualties of the Brook Brothers bankruptcy are the company’s suit factory in Haverhill, Massachusetts, its shirt factory in Garland, North Carolina, and its necktie factory in Queens, New York.
Brooks Brothers is not the only victim of a changing economy. In 2017, Cone Mills shut down the last selvage denim mill, meaning denim made on a traditional shuttle loom, in the U.S. Hertling, another iconic American clothing manufacturer, resorted to crowdfunding to save its business. The country that shaped global style for most of the past century now produces little in the way of actual clothing.
The enthusiast and the casual buyer don’t shop at the same places, but their buying habits are equally unmoored from class, profession, geography, and nationality. Fast-fashion outlets, connected to global supply chains that prize speed and efficiency over durability and labor standards, can afford to chase trends and commodify the latest fads from social media. Dedicated menswear enthusiasts, meanwhile, can dip into whatever niche subculture catches their fancy.
The bifurcation of consumers into upscale hobbyists and fast-fashion shoppers has changed the way menswear brands reach potential buyers. At least as far as clothes are concerned, the middle no longer exists — better to appeal to a dedicated niche, be it sneakerheads, workwear obsessives, or prep revivalists, than explain how to buy your first navy suit to a mass audience that no longer cares. GQ’s editor, Will Welch, is quite open about this new approach: “I believe that we’re in a niche-driven environment. … We have exited the era of general interest being a successful goal.”
As menswear journalism shifts toward young, upwardly mobile creatives with specific tastes, magazines have begun to adopt their target demographic’s political views, and posh menswear retailers have followed suit. Mr. Porter, an online clearinghouse for upscale brands, now publishes first-person essays on “white male violence.” Permanent Style, a British website for mens’ style obsessives, bestowed its 2020 charitable giving award on the pricey webstore No Man Walks Alone for contributing to various Black Lives Matter organizations. Patagonia, the outdoorsy retailer prized for its emphasis on sustainability, had “Vote the Assholes Out” sewn on its tags last year, and it doesn’t take much imagination to guess which “assholes” the company was referring to. The CEO of The Armoury, a Hong Kong menswear shop with satellites in New York and London, took a break from Instagram posts about shirt-and-tie pairings and benchgrade shoes to share his thoughts on “redlining,” the pre-Civil Rights practice of discriminatory housing, after George Floyd was killed. The contemporary political issues that do and do not get mentioned by a China-based menswear executive with a global clientele are quite revealing.
What the boardroom executives and factory foremen of yesteryear would make of their stylistic inheritors is an open question. The subcultures that birthed our most iconic American styles, from blue-collar trades to boarding schools, were assuredly rife with problematic behavior. But for the a la carte crowd, stylistic cues can be safely appropriated without any of the cultural baggage.
Form usually follows function. You don’t see many cowboys these days, and blue-collar jobs and WASP-y East Coast country clubs are also on the wane. Even the military has become something of a niche subculture. Will American style survive the decline of the professions and institutions that gave us our most iconic clothes? Perhaps deep-pocketed menswear enthusiasts will preserve these styles, similar to monks at the dawn of the Middle Ages painstakingly copying precious Latin manuscripts. Otherwise, wearing an Oxford shirt or a denim chore jacket may soon feel as anachronistic as going for a stroll in Edwardian morning dress.
Will Collins is a high school teacher in Budapest, Hungary.
