RiffPost by is one of my favorite newsletters. Its central premise is best explained by the titular assertion of a recent, popular entry, “Men still don’t know how to dress.” This is true, and it bothers me a lot. I famously love men—that is a central premise of my own newsletter. But I wish that men were hotter. Fetishizing them is the great joy of my life, but it’s easy to run out of things to fetishize when so many men shop at Vuori.

No one has a problem discussing the badness of manhood as an identity or social class, but our culture struggles to address a foundational cause of said “badness”: men are lazy. This causes them to ask stupid questions, look stupid, and act stupidly. Letting themselves be whisked away by fleeting impulses and ideas is easier than figuring anything out. Bopping around is easier than learning what makes men cool, who they are cool to, and why women like them. Going to Vuori is easier than going on eBay.

Some people might say men’s deference to women and queer people for instructions and caretaking is one of the spines of contemporary imperialism, and maybe they’d be right! But I also think masculine laziness makes men profoundly unhappy. They twist their emotions to repress them, delaying interior development so as to maintain a veneer of freewheeling merriment while only actually acting on a set number of non-taboo desires and interests. Artists, jocks, bros, and clowns all do this. It’s why men are so boring. It’s also why Jacob Elordi and Bo Burnham are my mortal enemies; they have relied on being tall to be hot, and have forgotten to develop talents or charisma in the process.

In curating this year’s Famous & Beloved Gift Guide, I realized I had a lot more profundity to offer in the specific realm of men’s products. Many, if not most, of my friends are also definitionally “guys” (more an aesthetic category than a gendered one). I’ll leave specifics (weird rules about “boxiness”) and obvious rules (no fabrics that stretch) to experts like Nick. But in the same vein of the romance advice newsletter I wrote for Valentine’s Day this year, which people still invoke to me as something they found funny—by which they mean cruel—I’d like to offer these people some support.

Buy some stuff, for yourself or your boyfriends or your friends. Men really need a lot of help.

How to dress as a man

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