What do Timothée Chalamet and The Pope have in common?
Tell the promoter we need more seats / We just sold out all the floor seats
When you think of the most stylish people right now—I mean that both in terms of the people most likely to be on a Condé Nast Instagram grid and also the people you’d most like to emulate—who do you think of? If you’re one of New York’s hottest “it” boys, you might say James Dean, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, or Austin Butler. If you’re a Teen Vogue reader, you might say Doechii, Sabrina Carpenter, or Ice Spice. A bit older, Rihanna or Jennifer Lawrence. These people seem widely diverse in the way they dress, but to me it’s all of a piece: extraordinarily and self-referentially American.
Last week, GQ claimed the “secret to looking hot in 2025” is dressing “like it’s 2005.” This is not untrue, and the edit is cute (I love polos and when men have their feet exposed), but the framing is off. Nostalgia, generally, is too lazy of an explanation of coolness. Children do this on TikTok by blaming newly defined “trend cycles,” something that has been happening since the dawn of colonialism, for contemporary over-consumption. Of course it’s easy to see 80s citations in 2020s pop music, 00s references in the reinvigoration of Blumarine and explosion of ERL. But none of this holistically addresses the fashion profile of a “cool person” right now.
The only people truly embracing mind-numbingly ugly (complimentary) silhouettes from two decades ago are downtown, E-list flaneurs, and “the 2000s” is only a good explanation for the way a small group of men dress, because their lady counterparts’ corporate-chic, ankle-socks-with-loafers thing is a weird amalgamation of citations that create something completely new (derogatory). If you look at GQ’s own grid, there is a much more interesting trend to uncover.
Louisianan Addison Rae did her GQ feature wearing Minnie Ears, and they reported on the American Pope wearing a White Sox hat. Just a few weeks ago, phones were ablaze with coverage of Timothée Chalamet’s outfits at Knicks games, a collection of white trash ensembles with Kardashian-as-accessory, sometimes photographed beside Spike Lee in a Knicks zoot suit. X.com users have frequently labeled this sense of style as, like, “if Guy Fieri and Tommy Lee had a baby.” Kind of: Chalamet is embracing, half-in-jest, the cultural milieu of Chrome Hearts, i.e. crazy ass white boy. But just because those are the only two guys you can name who have ever worn “crazy” sunglasses or wife beaters doesn’t mean they are the only ones, nor do they have the same cultural interests (lol) as Chalamet. As I’ve written before, the other famous person Timothée Chalamet probably dresses the most like is his niece-to-be North West.
What all these people—Jennifer Lawrence in a “Surfer Dude” fit, Ice Spice and Charli D’Amelio in a Kate Spade campaign, the American Pope in a baseball hat—have in common is that they are dressed like the people you grew up with in New York or California or the Midwestern suburbs. In 2005 sometimes, yes, but also in 1989 and 2010 and 2025. When people work too hard, are siloed by race and class across vast geographies, forcibly united by unique contemporaneity and their sheer division, you get workwear and athleisure shaped by cultural appropriation that leads to weird formalities and comfortability. That’s all-American.
The new trend is an absence of trend itself; a diversity in appropriating workwear or reverting to one’s most basic style impulses, almost following a trend so absent-mindedly it becomes something new. Girls are wearing UGGs and leggings less because they’re aspirational or cool again and more because they are comfortable and convenient. And crazy ass white men are living out a fantasy, where it is finally culturally acceptable for them to dress like black teenagers again. Because the last time this was the case was in the 00s, I understand the conflations and over-simplifications coming from naming it. But, especially in the context of how particularly individualist and ugly America is right now, I think it’s important to just look a little more closely.
No matter where you’re from, your family never stopped wearing skinny jeans or jorts or flip flops. If you step on the MTA for five seconds, you will see 10 outfits on people who probably do not read GQ that GQ would call nostalgic or “so 2005.” This trend is both good (UGGs, denim, Brooklynites wearing something other than Muji) and bad (white people dressing like black teenagers), but it is certainly more in line with my general disposition toward dressing than other recent fashion epochs were, i.e. TikTok-inspired “Scandinavian” over-accessorization.
I can’t really describe my sense of style as anything other than simplistic. In makeup and hairdos and outfits, the only thing I really care about all the time is looking like I’m trying too hard: I need to avoid this at all costs. But I also really don’t want to try too hard. I don’t want to walk to dinner in a thong or mules, nor do I want to meticulously stack necklaces or listen to them jangle. I want to wear a SKIMS dress—one of the most American garments of all time—with Birkenstocks, a newly bastardized symbol of American summer camp.
People love to dunk on girls wearing athletic shorts and nice shoes, but it’s kind of the same thing as dudes wearing jeans and tennis shoes: willing to sacrifice one element of comfort for social standards or style, but not two. I don’t think it looks great, but I think it’s amazing that enough rich girls started doing it that I can go to a nice dinner without buttons digging into my stomach and no one thinks anything of it. What’s cool about it isn’t so much the proportion or fabric combinations it affords, but that you would go out and not give enough of a fuck to put on real pants. Of course, it’s easy to mess up: if the rest of the outfit is too try-hard, you’ve defeated the purpose… you really have to sustain the aura of an American high schooler getting Starbucks after volleyball. But if you really believe in the American spirit of the Dri-FITs, the UGGs, the Chrome Hearts, you soar.
Two outfits
When I see a really good outfit, e.g. Lady Gaga arriving at the Athens airport in a sarong or Kylie Jenner in a snapback and wedding gown, I will think about it most days for the rest of my life. Two recent additions to this catalog happened last summer, which I think perfectly exemplify what I’m talking about.
Before any of her singles were released, I saw Addison Rae late at night in a sequin tank top and absolutely no makeup. I walked by her too fast to note what else she had on, but she seemed almost as tall as me, so maybe Louboutins, and I remember thinking she looked comfortable, so she was probably wearing something close to Dri-FITs. I could see her acne scars but she looked impossibly beautiful and summery, yet it was clear she was on her way to a serious outing, sequins and dressed up friend in tow.
Around the same time, Austin Butler went to see Oh, Mary! in black cotton pants, a nondescript black hat, an inside out t-shirt, and Cortezes. A few days later, he saw JOB wearing the exact same outfit, except with one of the Giants hats he wears in Caught Stealing.
There is nothing more American in the bad way than dressing up or trying too hard at brunch or a show and looking like a tourist. There is nothing more American in the cool way than being so callous and hot that you just wear the clothes you want to wear—a t-shirt you think is comfortable or a sequin tank top—and nothing you don’t: close-to-sweatpants to Oh, Mary!, no makeup to be the hottest girl downtown.
I am American and I like being comfortable. It is fine when someone I think is hot dresses like this, when it’s genuine on someone from Orange County of Louisiana or Wisconsin (me), and bad when someone I think is cringe partakes (someone who went to LaGuardia and looks 16 years old). America is evil and everyone hates us, yet everyone also thinks we’re really cool. We should probably keep exploiting that until we can’t anymore, and certainly embrace the diversity of trash and indulgence that comes with it.
The forecast
This era of cool dressing is just really hitting its stride, which means we must begin looking toward what’s next. I think we can start our guesses with Burberry’s new campaign, launched a couple months before Oasis starts touring worldwide.
What are the coolest outfits you’ve ever seen? Is your fashion icon British or American?
I think, too, people care far too much about references instead of how clothes look on their body.
Should a big fat white guy be wearing only Japanese clothes? No.
Recently emblematic of this was how people picked apart the Carolyn Bessette styling for the new Ryan Murphy show—the clothes just look bad because they don’t fit her right, it’s not that the “references are wrong.”
I’m not sure how everyone got creative director brain, but it’s bad and needs to stop.
My sense of style increased tenfold when I started optimizing for comfort. Obviously I have some signature uncomfortably items, but to me, there is nothing I feel more confident and put together in than loose shorts and a big dress shirt. I want Birks kinda even tho my last pair tore up my feet