Why do men dress the way we do?
Although there are pockets of sharply dressed environments, the average South African man doesn’t seem particularly obsessed with dressing up for his daily routine. Pretorians, in particular, seem to have developed a remarkable ability to construct an entire wardrobe around clothing that doesn’t require shoes.
Or is that just me?
Perhaps our casual dress says more about us than we realise. We tend to think of clothes as a matter of taste: I like jeans. I don’t like suits. I’m more of a T-shirt guy. But our taste doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The clothes we choose are shaped by our culture, our ideas about masculinity, our work, our social status and, perhaps most importantly, our ideas about what is normal.
A man should be useful.
There is a fascinating theory in the history of menswear called the Great Male Renunciation, proposed by psychologist J.C. Flügel. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, men gradually abandoned much of the colour, ornament and extravagance that had previously been perfectly acceptable in male dress. Men increasingly dressed plainly and practically, while women retained much more freedom to decorate themselves.
In other words, men gradually gave up their right to be beautiful, in order to be more useful. There were plenty of reasons for this transformation. Enlightenment ideas, political revolutions, changing social structures and the rise of industrial society all played a role. Military uniforms became increasingly standardised, and professional life increasingly demanded clothing that was practical, restrained and respectable.
Beau Brummell and his aristocratic clique greatly influences the dress of modern men. His contribution to men’s fashion was not extravagance but restraint. The modern gentleman could be stylish precisely because he appeared as though he wasn’t trying too hard. Dark colours, excellent tailoring, immaculate cleanliness and subtle details replaced the elaborate decoration of previous generations. Though it proved an enormously successful formula, we should also consider that Beau died in abject poverty.
The uniform of the working man
Fast forward to today and we find ourselves in an interesting position.
Many men don’t wear suits anymore. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve rejected the idea of a uniform.
We’ve simply changed the uniform. A pair of jeans, a T-shirt, takkies and perhaps a hoodie can communicate something remarkably similar:
I’m here to work. I’m practical. I’m comfortable. I don’t have time for nonsense.
This is particularly interesting because our identity as men is still deeply connected to work.
Men have historically been expected to provide, build, protect, compete and produce. Even though many modern men spend their working days sitting behind computers rather than laying bricks, the psychological association between masculinity and exertion remains remarkably powerful.
So we dress for laying bricks while typing emails. And there’s another message hidden in this. Casual clothing can become a kind of virtue signalling:
My work is so important that I don’t need to impress you with my clothes.
Steve Jobs understood this perfectly. His black turtleneck became a uniform. The message was essentially:
I have more interesting things to think about than fashion.
Other successful men have adopted their own versions of the same idea. The details change, but the underlying message remains:
Judge me by what I do, not what I wear.
And there is something admirable about that. In an unequal economic environment, where many skilled people genuinely cannot afford expensive clothes, there is also something deeply democratic about refusing to make clothing a measure of a man’s worth.
But here’s where things get interesting.
What if the choice isn’t actually as free as we think it is?
When casual becomes a costume
If you have ever felt uncomfortable dressing up, ask yourself why. Not whether you like suits. Ask why you dislike the feeling of being noticeably well dressed. Does it feel pretentious? Does it feel like you’re trying too hard? Does it make you feel as though people are looking at you? Does it somehow feel less masculine? Or perhaps you worry that people will think you care more about your appearance than your work.
These reactions are not necessarily personal preferences. They can be cultural programming.
I encounter this constantly with men who would actually like to dress better. The distance between the way they currently dress and the men they see on Instagram can feel enormous.
But the problem isn’t necessarily that they don’t know what looks good. It’s that they’ve learned that wanting to look good is somehow incompatible with being themselves.
I know this particular trap because I’ve been in it myself. At one point I realised that I wasn’t dressing badly by accident. I was dressing specifically to be unnoticed. That was a rather uncomfortable realisation.
Because once you understand that, you have to ask yourself why.
What was I afraid my clothes might communicate? What did I think would happen if people noticed me? And what exactly was I trying to prove by looking deliberately ordinary?
The suit is a uniform too
There is a wonderful irony here. We sometimes imagine the suit as the opposite of individuality: restrictive, conservative and old-fashioned. But the suit is actually one of the most fascinating examples of a uniform becoming a vehicle for self-expression. The modern suit is, in many ways, deliberately boring. And yet once you’ve accepted the basic rules, you discover an enormous amount of freedom within them.
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A pink tie.
Brown
This is the magic of the suit: although the garment is restrained, the man wearing it doesn’t have to be.
The rules give you a framework within which you can play.
And perhaps this is one reason men have been reinventing the suit for more than two centuries.
So why did men stop wearing colour?
If men once wore elaborate fabrics, bright colours and extravagant decoration, how did we arrive at the grey-and-blue wardrobe of the modern businessman?
Part of the answer lies in that Great Male Renunciation. Men gradually decided that beauty was not particularly masculine. The respectable man became restrained. The successful man became serious. The working man became practical. And fashion became something women did.
Men were expected to have style, perhaps — but not to care too much about it.
The pandemic disrupted much of the old dress-code hierarchy.
Offices emptied. Suits disappeared. Zoom calls replaced boardrooms. People discovered that they could do their jobs wearing almost anything. Some men responded by abandoning formal clothing completely.
But something unexpected happened too. Some of us discovered that we actually missed dressing up. After years of increasingly casual menswear, there seems to be a growing appetite for colour, pattern, tailoring and beautiful things.
Pink suits.
Yellow suits.
Interesting fabrics.
Unusual accessories.
Vintage clothing.
Bold patterns.
Ridiculously impractical embellishments.
Men are experimenting again.
Perhaps we’re rediscovering something that we lost.
Not simply the suit.
The permission to enjoy being beautiful.
You might genuinely prefer jeans and a T-shirt.
That’s absolutely fine.
But it is worth asking whether that preference is actually yours.
Or whether you’ve inherited a particular idea of masculinity without ever examining it.
Because dressing well doesn’t make you less hardworking, practical or intelligent.
And wearing a beautiful suit isn’t going to suddenly transform you into someone who spends his days lounging around drinking champagne.
You can care about your clothes and still care deeply about your work.
In fact, I would argue that the two can reinforce one another.
Clothing is communication. Before you’ve said a word, you’ve already told the world something about yourself.
The question is simply whether you’ve chosen the message.
So what does your wardrobe say about you?
Perhaps you genuinely love your old jeans and T-shirt.
Excellent.
Perhaps you feel most yourself in a three-piece suit.
Excellent.
Perhaps you’re somewhere between the two.
That’s the interesting part.
The goal isn’t to persuade every man to dress like a tailor.
The goal is to make you conscious of the choice.
Your clothes are one of the ways you unconsciously tell the world who you believe you are.
So why not make that message deliberate?
Wear the jeans because you love them.
Wear the T-shirt because it expresses something about you.
Wear the suit because you enjoy the transformation.
Wear the ridiculous pink jacket because you looked in the mirror and smiled.
And if you’re not sure what your style says about you yet, that’s fine too.
That’s what this guide is for.
Let’s explore the possibilities.
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