The rise of menswear romanticism: the new aesthetic reshaping how men dress

It is not a coincidence that Jacob Elordi chooses to wear womenswear from Chanel or Bottega Veneta off-duty, without sponsorship, stylist, or explanation. Or that A$AP Rocky becomes a face of Chanel despite the house producing no menswear line. What makes these moments significant is not the celebrity behaviour itself, it is what it signals about the consumer behind it.

More than half of Gen Z consumers believe gender-neutral clothing is the future of fashion. 56% prefer brands that offer gender-neutral options, while 33% have already purchased from gender-fluid collections. The global unisex apparel market, worth $11.73 billion in 2024, is projected to reach $62 billion by 2033.

So here is the question fashion professionals should be sitting with: if the consumer has already moved, what is the industry waiting for?

The rules were invented

Gendered clothing categories are not a natural law. For most of human history, clothing differentiated social status far more than sex. Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans wore draped and wrapped garments across genders; variation was expressed through material and decoration, not binary form. It was only in the late eighteenth century that Western menswear underwent what the psychoanalyst John Carl Flügel called the "great male renunciation": a decisive cultural shift in which men abandoned ornamentation in favour of sobriety and restraint, effectively outsourcing visual expression to womenswear. Before that moment, pink was associated with financial power and physical bravery, or decoration signalled status, not gender.

The binary the modern fashion industry is built around is, in historical terms, both recent and culturally specific. Worth remembering the next time a buying meeting treats "menswear" and "womenswear" as self-evident, permanent categories. However, the industry still rests on assumptions that are rarely questioned

For instance, have you ever wondered why tweed is considered feminine? It was originally woven for men on Scottish moors, Coco Chanel borrowed it for women and made it iconic. Or is sheer inherently womanly because it is delicate? Is a suit masculine because it has structure? These distinctions underpin how collections are designed, how stores are organised, and how consumers are guided through the act of shopping. They are historical accidents. And right now, they are starting to break.

The article text continues below the images

The long road to now

Fashion has challenged these rules before, but usually from the margins. David Bowie in a dress, Prince in lingerie on stage, Kurt Cobain in floral dresses, these were framed as provocations. Which at the time were important culturally, but merely outliers.

What changed now was scale and normalisation. Harry Styles's 2020 Vogue cover translated gender fluidity into something the mainstream could process. What has followed is a generation of cultural figures: Timothée Chalamet, or Jacob Elordi, who are not dressing to make a statement, they are simply dressing. Chalamet's sheer blouses and embellished tailoring no longer register as controversial, and Elordi wore a women's Chanel jacket on the Wuthering Heights press tour without a stylist's directive and without sponsorship and now all publications reference him as the best dressed man.

These men are not the cause of a shift, they are its consequence. The cause is structural: a generation of male consumers increasingly comfortable with ambiguity, sensitivity, and self-expression in how they dress. That is the shift. And for fashion professionals, the more interesting question is not whether it is happening, but what it means for the business.

The article text continues below the images

What this means for buyers and brands

The male consumer who is engaging with this shift is not a niche customer. He is typically higher-spend, more brand-loyal, and less driven by trend cycles than the streetwear cohort that dominated the previous decade. Independent retailers who moved early, stocking labels like Séfr, Bode, Auralee or even COS several seasons ago, are already seeing this commercially. These labels are selling craft, texture, and emotional register: chunky artisanal knitwear, worn-in tailoring in natural fibres, earthy palettes, considered silhouettes.

For instance, the men's bag has quietly become a genuine retail category, and the search data proves it. According to Google Trends, search interest in men's bags grew 3,750% over the past twelve months, outpacing women's bag searches, which grew 2,400% over the same period (line chart). And within the related searches to “men’s bags”, the ones rising the most are “tote bag”, “men's tote bag”, or “men’s beach bag” (bar chart) – signaling this normalisation of more typically womanly items.

For buyers, the practical implication is a product mix question, not an identity question. Which categories translate? Which labels are already operating in this space? How do you merchandise it without it reading as a trend stunt? The answer, from the retailers doing it well, is to lead with quality and craft, not with the gender conversation. The customer is shopping a wardrobe.

The global menswear market is projected to grow from $620 billion in 2024 to nearly $1 trillion by 2033, with evolving gender norms explicitly cited as a structural driver, which is a great commercial signal.

Where is menswear going?

Not toward androgyny as a statement. Toward something more commercially viable, which I like to call “romantic realism”: a softening of the male wardrobe that is less about transgression and more about texture, craft, and emotional register. The question now is whether the rest of the industry's infrastructure, its buying floors, brand categories, trade show organisation, and the language it uses to describe clothing, is capable of meeting him.

Menswear and womenswear as fixed, distinct categories made sense in the world the "great male renunciation" created. That world is over and brands and retailers that recognise this first, not as a social position, but as a commercial reality, will be the ones best positioned for what comes next.

Clothes don't have a gender. And they never really did, the industry built its entire architecture around the idea anyway. Now it is going to have to rebuild, and the ones who start now will have the advantage.