Before I knew anything about class, status, or style, I knew this: if you wanted to enter a world, you had to be dressed for it. That was the lesson Mr Benn taught me. Every episode began with the same uniform of respectable English stability: jacket, tie, bowler hat, striped trousers. He then stepped into the fancy-dress shop, changed clothes, and found himself somewhere else entirely. A cowboy, a spaceman, a diver, a hunter: the outfit changed, and so did the world. Looking back, it feels less like a children’s cartoon than an early lesson in menswear. Clothes do not just express who you are. They decide where you can go, how you will be read, and what kind of life becomes possible.

What strikes me now is how exact that logic was. Everything depends on what Mr Benn is wearing before anything happens. He is dressed correctly for the City: respectable, conventional, immediately legible. His clothes fix him in place. The jacket, tie, bowler hat, and striped trousers do not make him interesting so much as readable, the figure of a man properly dressed within an ordered world and securely in his place. Nothing in the outfit implies risk, improvisation, or escape. That is why the transformation works. Before anything can change, he must first be stabilised.

But once he gets changed, the terms shift. The costume does not just alter his appearance; it changes what becomes possible. That was the lesson Mr Benn taught me as a child: when you get dressed, you get changed. In the hunter’s jacket, he can move through the jungle as though he belongs there. In the frogman suit, he can enter an underwater world. In the spacesuit, he can step onto another planet and move through it with ease. The clothes do not simply dress him; they change how he is met, what he can do, and what kind of story he is allowed to enter.

That is what Mr Benn understood so well. He cannot improvise his way into these worlds as the man he was before. He has to get changed. The fitting room is a threshold. It makes visible something usually left unspoken: you cannot enter a world unless you are correctly dressed for it.

Most people learn some version of this before they have the words for it. The wrong clothes make things harder. They make you visible in the wrong way. The right clothes reduce friction. They let you pass. Once you learn that as a child, you do not forget it.

You can see the same logic later in British menswear, especially in casual culture, where clothes made for one world are lifted into another: hunting jackets, military gear, technical outerwear, workwear. This is usually described as style, but style does not fully explain the force these garments carry. They come charged with authority, readiness, protection, movement. The outfit comes first, and the behaviour follows.

Workwear and military clothing had long been worn beyond their original purpose, from denim in postwar America to surplus clothing in youth culture. What changes in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s is not their presence but their meaning. As recession takes hold, jobs for life begin to disappear, and mass unemployment reshapes entire regions, the structures that once gave men stability, routine, and place begin to weaken. Clothes associated with work still looked solid, competent, and dependable, but the world that had once made those qualities believable was starting to come apart.

Under those conditions, clothes associated with work, competence, and routine acquired a new charge. They no longer simply reflected working life. They began to compensate for its loss. Stability was weakening, but its visual codes endured. Menswear continued to offer the look of authority, control, and readiness long after the structures that had once made them believable had begun to break apart. If anything, those promises only grew more attractive. The clothes still let men look prepared, grounded, and in place, even when the world that had once made that feeling possible was slipping away.

Massimo Osti understood that perfectly. He did not invent military, industrial, or technical clothing, but he recognised what those garments had come to mean. He brought into everyday menswear the authority of clothes shaped by work, discipline, and use. What he sold was not just utility, but the look of competence: readiness, protection, control. His clothes felt less like fashion than equipment. They gave men access to the signs of function at exactly the moment when work, class, and identity were becoming less secure. Modern menswear would draw its power not from stability itself, but from the appearance of stability. Mr Benn turned that logic into a children’s story. Osti turned it into a wardrobe.

Looking back, Mr Benn captured something larger than a children’s cartoon. Clothes do not simply prepare you for the world. They help decide which world you are allowed to enter. For much of the twentieth century, menswear also seemed to connect men to a stable role within that world. That is why menswear still carries so much weight. We keep dressing for recognition, authority, and belonging long after the structures that once guaranteed them have weakened. The trouble is that the world those clothes once seemed to grant access to has gone.

What remains is the belief that dressing correctly might still be enough to bring that world back.

Mr Benn images: created by David McKee, produced by David McKee Productions (1971–72)

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About the author

Andrew Groves is Professor of Fashion Design and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster. He writes weekly on menswear, archives, and systems, focusing on how authority and value are produced through clothing. andrewgroves.com

This newsletter examines how menswear operates as a system. Authority, credibility, and value are produced through use, regulation, and appearance.

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Most people misread Masonic regalia as decorative, as a ceremonial display of aprons, collars, and metal jewels, even though each element has a specific function. What appears ornamental is in fact organised information that fixes meaning through role, rank, and position, turning dress into a system. Though I am not a Freemason, it is the clarity of that system that fascinates me.

To read Masonic dress, you start with the common ground. In English Craft Freemasonry, that means black suit, white shirt, tie, and black shoes. This is not a matter of taste. It suppresses individual variation and establishes a uniform baseline from which difference can be read clearly. This is not where distinction is marked; it is what makes the system legible, providing the ground on which the regalia can operate.

The apron is the most visible element, and the first point at which rank enters the system. Worn at the waist, and derived from the stonemason’s lambskin apron, it indicates degree: the stage a Mason has reached within the lodge. In English Craft Freemasonry there are three degrees: Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason.

The Entered Apprentice wears the apron in its simplest plain white form. The Fellow Craft’s apron adds further detail, while the Master Mason’s is more elaborate again, typically marked by coloured edging and three rosettes. The apron does not decorate the body; it records a progression through the degrees.

Above it sits the collar. Worn around the neck, it forms part of office regalia rather than degree. Suspended from it is the jewel, a metal emblem that identifies a Mason’s office more precisely. Together, they make present office legible, showing not how far a Mason has progressed, but what role he holds within the lodge.

Other jewels are worn elsewhere. Pinned to the left breast of the jacket, like medals, these breast jewels indicate past office, service, or affiliation. They mark not present office, but prior service and institutional connection.

Each element carries different information. The apron marks progression; the collar and its jewel indicate present office; breast jewels indicate past service or affiliation. Read together, they organise time on the body. Progression, office, and record are held apart and made legible at once.

This system works because it is stable. Its meanings hold because its rules hold. The distinctions between degree, office, and service are not constantly revised, reinterpreted, or aestheticised; they are maintained. That stability allows the system to function with precision.

This places it at odds with the dominant logic of contemporary fashion, where meaning is produced through endless change. It depends on novelty, turnover, and obsolescence. Menswear, in many of its functional forms, works differently. It often derives authority through continuity. Meaning is not produced by replacement, but preserved through repetition.

Ceremonial dress makes this especially clear. These systems begin as function, organising bodies, establishing rank, and regulating behaviour. Over time, function becomes rule. Repeated, enforced, and transmitted across generations, the system stabilises. Their meanings do not drift because the structure that produces them remains intact.

Masonic regalia is an unusually clear example of how ceremonial dress retains meaning over time. The formal dress remains fixed, while the regalia layered onto it keeps degree, office, and service clearly distinct. Their meanings remain stable and legible. It has not been subjected to the same processes of loosening, borrowing, and reinterpretation that have affected much contemporary menswear. Its authority accumulates through continuity.

That continuity is not abstract; it is material and social. Regalia is often passed down, from father to son, from one Freemason to another. More importantly, the system itself is transmitted intact. The current wearer does not invent its meaning; he inherits it.

To wear it is to occupy a position within an existing structure. The apron, collar, and jewel do not reveal who the wearer feels himself to be. They assign his place within the lodge. His position is specific, but not unique. Others held it before him; others will hold it after him.

Masonic dress does more than make the present legible; it places the wearer within a sequence that existed before him and will continue after him. Over time, that continuity produces a different kind of power. It lies not in individual expression, but in endurance. It does not need to be constantly restated because it is continuously enacted.

In most contemporary dress, these systems have eroded. Formal dress codes have given way to informal conventions. Signals drift, meanings blur, and interpretation becomes situational and personal. Menswear frequently borrows the appearance of uniform, ceremony, and work without retaining the rules that once made those garments exact. Rank becomes style, function becomes mood, and authority becomes aesthetic.

Masonic dress stands apart because it has not followed that trajectory. Its rules remain fixed and its distinctions intact. In that context, its clarity becomes more noticeable. It does not simply mark belonging; it shows that the system still holds.

What now looks obscure is not the clothing itself, but the rarity of a dress system that still holds meaning this precisely. Most dress no longer does.

Masonic regalia does. It does not ask what the wearer wants to be; it tells the room how he is to be read. Its authority lies not in individuality, but in continuity. The wearer is temporary; the system is not.

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About the author

Andrew Groves is Professor of Fashion Design and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster. He writes weekly on menswear, archives, and systems, focusing on how authority and value are produced through clothing. andrewgroves.com

This newsletter examines how menswear operates as a system. Authority, credibility, and value are produced through use, regulation, and appearance.

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In Exactitudes, I argued that clothing works as a recognition system, helping people place others quickly, often before anything is said. The point was not simply that clothes are judged, but that ease is unevenly distributed. “Ease is granted to those who look right.” That now reads less like an observation about clothing than a description of the world digital systems are trying to build. The promise of digital ID is that it will remove friction. What it really does is make legibility deeper, more continuous, and harder to escape.

Menswear has long trained us into this logic. Uniforms, school wear, office wear, technical outerwear, workwear, formal dress: all reduce ambiguity and make bodies easier to process.

In Utopia Under Control, writing about dress codes, CCTV, queueing systems and cashless space, I argued that male dress often functions as a low-tech system of anticipatory judgement, helping others decide whether the body in front of them looks compliant, respectable, volatile, or out of place. “When clothing stops sorting bodies, sorting does not disappear, it moves.”

It moves from dress into infrastructure, from the glance to the database, from the bouncer to the verification system, from social reading to administrative processing.

Digital ID is not simply a more efficient way of proving who you are. It embeds judgement deeper into the conditions of access, linking entry to traceability and traceability to control. Because it comes wrapped in the language of convenience, many people will accept it as a technical upgrade. But systems like this are never just about proof. They change when proof is demanded, how often it is demanded, and what happens when you cannot provide it cleanly. That might mean renting a flat, entering a workplace, collecting a parcel, opening an account, crossing a border, or accessing a service. What is being normalised is not just identification, but permanent readiness for inspection.

Older systems of menswear, for all their arbitrariness, still left room for ambiguity. Dress codes could be read, misread, negotiated, bent, resisted, or worked around. A “no tracksuits” door could still be passed in jeans and a shirt. As I wrote in Utopia Under Control, “as long as the clothes read correctly, the body passed.”

Digital ID seeks to close that gap. It does not merely ask that you look right. It asks that your identity be continuously available in the right form, at the right moment. The person is not met, but matched. Not known, but authenticated. What matters is whether the system can resolve you cleanly enough to let you through.

One of the reasons I wrote Holding the Body at a Distance was to think about opacity as a form of protection. In that essay, I argued that the Pet Shop Boys built “a system that allowed them to be seen without being surrendered.” That line matters far beyond pop image-making. It names something essential that digital ID steadily erodes: the ability to appear in public without becoming fully available, to be present without total disclosure, to decide what remains withheld.

For some people, that space was never trivial. It was protection. Gay men, Black men, and others whose bodies have long been met first with suspicion have often had to think carefully about how they appear in public, how much they reveal, and what might happen if they are read in the wrong way. Dress could create distance, buy time, reduce exposure, help someone pass unnoticed or at least less exposed. Digital ID moves in the opposite direction; it treats that ambiguity as failure.

Digital ID treats opacity as a fault. What cannot be instantly resolved begins to look suspicious. Delay is recoded as failure, and any space between appearance and verification is treated as something the system should eliminate. But friction is not always a defect. Sometimes it is what remains of freedom in everyday life: the chance to move without producing an immediate trail, the possibility of entering a room or accessing a service without binding that action to a system that does not forget.

The people most damaged by frictionless systems are those already closest to scrutiny: the poor, the undocumented, people with unstable housing, those whose records do not align neatly, and those whose bodies or identities have always been met first with suspicion.

It does not simply ask to see you. It asks to fix you in a form that can be stored, checked, and recalled on demand. What was once situational becomes repeatable. The old demand to look right becomes a new demand to resolve correctly.

Menswear already taught us that ease was never evenly distributed, that some bodies move with less interruption because they are read as correct before they are known. Digital ID keeps that inequality intact while hardening it into infrastructure. What was once a glance becomes a record. What was once suspicion becomes protocol. What was once a social judgement becomes a system requirement.

The garment once helped the body pass. What digital ID demands is more final than that. It does not want the body interpreted, but resolved. Not socially, not provisionally, but fully, correctly, and on demand.

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About the author

Andrew Groves is Professor of Fashion Design and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster. He writes weekly on menswear, archives, and systems, focusing on how authority and value are produced through clothing. andrewgroves.com

This newsletter examines how menswear operates as a system. Authority, credibility, and value are produced through use, regulation, and appearance.

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By the time people started talking about Pep Guardiola’s trousers, the easy story had already been written. The Our Legacy shirt had been identified, priced, and circulated; the Wembley rigout scrutinised, its wider, softer silhouette read as part of the same shift. The Guardian saw liberation and legacy. GQ saw a manager becoming unexpectedly cool. All of that makes sense. It also misses the more interesting point, because it assumes Guardiola’s clothes have only recently become meaningful.

As someone who watches Manchester City week in, week out, home and away, I am less interested in this supposed arrival of style than in the long period before it, when what Guardiola wore was already shaping how he was read but was rarely recognised as doing so.

That is part of a wider problem in how menswear is reported and understood. It is usually read through rupture rather than system. The easy story is the unusual jumper, the recognisable designer label, the silhouette that suddenly looks different enough to name. Those moments are legible because they break the pattern. But they also distort it, because they pull attention away from the quieter work menswear usually does through repetition, containment, and control. In Guardiola’s case, that has meant treating the exceptions as the story and missing the system that made them exceptional in the first place.

For most of his managerial career, Guardiola has dressed in a way that makes his clothes disappear into function. Not because they were unconsidered, but because they were doing their job. Dark knits, narrow silhouettes, controlled repetition. The wardrobe reduced noise and stabilised authority. You saw him and understood the role immediately. The clothes did not ask to be interpreted, they made authority easier to read.

Men often treat clothing as a self-imposed uniform. Not just for consistency, but for efficiency: fewer decisions in private, clearer signals in public. In Guardiola’s case, that logic carries more weight because it mirrors the structure of his managerial style. His football works through repetition, discipline, and the reduction of uncertainty. Space is organised in advance. Decisions are embedded within structure. When it works, the complexity disappears and what remains is control that looks natural.

For almost a decade at Manchester City, his touchline wardrobe worked in much the same way.

That is why most of it passed largely without comment. There were moments that briefly drew attention: the Stone Island badge he removed, the so-called coatigan, the occasional brighter knit that interrupted the normal sombre palette. But these were treated as curiosities, one-offs, deviations. What went unremarked was the system itself: the consistency, the containment, the narrow range of silhouettes repeated week after week. What mattered was not the exception, but the uniformity.

Even his more recent C.P. Company garments belonged to that system. As Manchester City’s style partner, the brand already sat comfortably within the club’s official image, but its own technical, controlled design language also made it easy to fold into Guardiola’s existing uniform. On him, C.P. Company did not disrupt the managerial uniform; it reinforced it.

But that was never the whole story. Off duty, the system loosened. The striped Balenciaga knit worn out in Manchester a few years ago belonged to a different visual language. So did the earlier runway appearance for Antonio Miró. Guardiola was never indifferent to clothes. The discipline was already there, but most people simply were not looking for it in menswear, or in a football manager.

For years, that boundary held: on duty, control; off duty, a wardrobe less bound by the role. What has changed is not Guardiola’s interest in clothes, but where that language now appears. The Our Legacy shirt and the Wembley trousers mattered because they brought that shift onto the touchline.

Earlier in his career, Guardiola dressed as though the authority of the role still needed visible reinforcement. His wardrobe made him legible in advance and kept the role firmly in place. After years of sustained success, that degree of visual containment is less necessary.

That is why the trousers matter more than the shirt. A label can always be explained away. A changed silhouette cannot. The wider cut and softer outline point in the same direction. Guardiola is no longer dressing only to hold the role together.

That is what this moment exposes. Not a manager discovering style. Not a late-career reinvention. Something more structural than that.

On the pitch, Guardiola’s football has long been admired for the way control disappears into the game. On the touchline, his wardrobe worked the same way: disciplined enough to vanish into authority. What feels new is not that Guardiola has discovered style, but that the system has loosened enough for us to see it.

All images courtesy of Manchester City Football Club.

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About the author

Andrew Groves is Professor of Fashion Design and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster. He writes weekly on menswear, archives, and systems, focusing on how authority and value are produced through clothing. andrewgroves.com

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Safe. Successful. Respectable. The sort who own restaurants, deal in property, or sell sports cars. Men who would be waved through rather than stopped.

That judgement arrived quickly, almost before it registered as judgement. Before you had really taken in the jackets, the scarves, the knitwear. Before you knew anything about them at all, you had already placed them.

That moment is the subject of Exactitudes, the long-running photographic project by Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek. The title collapses “exact” and “attitudes”, and the method is as direct as it sounds: place individual styles side by side and they begin to read as types. By arranging people into grids of near-identical outfits, Exactitudes exposes something most of us prefer not to acknowledge: clothing is one of the ways strangers size one another up almost instantly.

The force of the work lies in its clarity. When twelve variations of the same look are lined up together, personal style starts to read less as expression and more as formula. The quilted jacket, the scarf looped just so, the denim, the belt, the stance. In isolation, each person appears individual. In a grid, they become a type. What the photographs reveal is not coincidence but convergence. The clothes are the evidence.

The method is strict: the same pose, the same neutral background, the same suspension of individual context. The grid does not create the type, but it renders it legible.

Most people insist they do not judge by appearance, that clothing does not matter, and that everyone should be treated the same. Yet the reading happens anyway. We make rapid judgements about who someone might be, where they belong, and whether they are safe to approach, ignore, avoid or challenge. What people call instinct is usually learned pattern recognition. The discomfort lies in the fact that the system runs in both directions. We size others up, but we are also being assessed. We remember this most clearly when that judgement turns against us: the look that says you don’t belong, the extra question at the door, the assumption that you cannot afford something, the suspicion that you might cause trouble. In those moments, clothing becomes one of the ways someone is reduced to a type rather than treated as a person.

Seen from this perspective, Exactitudes looks less like a study of style than a study of how clothing enables people to judge strangers on sight. What appears exaggerated in the grid is exactly what makes the signal work in the street. The paradox is simple: the more people try to distinguish themselves, the more they converge.

This convergence produces informal uniforms. No institution issues them, yet they operate with remarkable consistency. Subcultures, professions, and social groups all develop visual codes that allow members to recognise one another quickly. There is enough variation to feel personal, but not enough to disrupt recognition.

In Dealers, that uniform takes the form of soft professional authority: navy and grey tailoring, subdued ties or open collars, pocket squares, polished restraint. The men do not look identical, but they are legible in the same way. They read as competent, prosperous, and safe. In New Skool, the code changes but the mechanism does not: branded sportswear, backpacks, hooded layers, repeated silhouettes. Here too, clothing makes the wearer legible as a type before they have spoken. The signal changes, the instant social reading remains.

Over three decades, the project has built a record of thousands of these archetypes in cities around the world. What first appears to be fashion photography turns out to be a taxonomy of dress codes, a visual archive of how people learn to recognise one another.

The mechanism is not exclusive to men, but Exactitudes becomes especially useful when read through menswear. In many men’s spaces, clothing works as a quick signal that helps strangers decide how to place one another.

Readability matters more than originality. Clothing is treated as information: a set of signals about competence, class position, reliability, seriousness or threat. You are read as a type before you are encountered as a person.

Seen this way, the project can be read as documenting a form of surveillance that predates digital technology. People have always monitored one another through dress, scanning for cues of belonging, authority or risk. The grids make that system visible by stripping away the comforting fiction of individuality.

The point is not that people dress alike. The point is what happens when they do not. Some signals are read as competence. Others are read as threat.

The wrong signal is not simply unfashionable; it makes someone easier to question, easier to doubt, easier to exclude. The system rarely announces this openly. Instead, it introduces friction: the delayed welcome, the extra scrutiny, the small pause that tells you that you do not quite belong. Ease is granted to those who look right.

Exactitudes may seem amusing until you recognise yourself in it. Then the images start to feel disconcerting. The grid records how many people converge on the same visual formulas, not because they lack imagination, but because they know the cost of being misread. Clothing becomes a form of precaution. You dress not only to express yourself, but to avoid the look, the question, the pause, the small humiliation of being made to feel out of place before you have even arrived.

All Images: Ari Versluis & Ellie Uyttenbroek / Exactitudes

Exactitudes® Final Edition (2025) collects the complete 202-series in a single volume by Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek. It is available in English and priced at €65. https://exactitudes.com/shop/exactitudes/

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About the author

Andrew Groves is Professor of Fashion Design and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster. He writes weekly on menswear, archives, and systems, focusing on how authority and value are produced through clothing. andrewgroves.com

This newsletter examines how menswear operates as a system. Authority, credibility, and value are produced through use, regulation, and appearance.

Subscribe to receive one essay every Thursday.

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Most retrospectives are really stories about change: how an image evolved, how a look shifted, how a public self was remade. Pet Shop Boys Volume, Thames & Hudson’s new survey of the group’s visual work from 1984 to 2024, is more interesting for the opposite reason. It shows what held firm. Across forty years of output, the Pet Shop Boys kept returning to the same problem: how to remain visible in public without becoming fully available. Their answer lay in two parallel systems: graphic design and menswear. The first of these was shaped above all by Mark Farrow, whose work did not simply package the group but established the visual logic through which they would be seen.

Graphic design ordered the image. Menswear ordered the body. Together they enabled Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe to appear in public without ever quite giving themselves away. Farrow’s achievement was to turn restraint into a system: scale, typography, cropping, repetition, and white space were never decorative additions, but methods for regulating access. What he designed was not just a series of record sleeves, but a visual structure strong enough to hold identity in place even when the body receded.

You can see that system already fully formed on their debut album Please. Rather than introducing Tennant and Lowe through the usual pop conventions of scale, presence, and emotional access, Farrow reduces them to a tiny image suspended in a large white field. Inside, the same principle continues in a grid of equally sized portraits, with no single image allowed to dominate. There is no invitation to intimacy. The body is not hidden, but placed under graphic discipline. This does more than produce a memorable sleeve; it establishes Farrow’s method. Scale, spacing, repetition, and white space regulate how the body can appear, keeping the image legible while limiting access.

On Actually, menswear performs a similar function. The black-tie dinner jackets are not simply formal. They belong to a tradition of performance uniform, associated as much with orchestral discipline as with social occasion.

In that context, formal wear works to anonymise; it organises musicians into ranks, allowing the work to take precedence over the person. The body becomes part of a disciplined collective, legible as professional yet resistant to intimacy. What looks like heightened visibility is therefore also a mechanism of withdrawal; visibility governed by convention, a surface that permits public appearance while keeping personality at a distance.

Black tie also sits outside fashion’s usual cycle of novelty. Its authority depends on repetition and correctness, rather than update. In that sense, the Actually cover quietly refuses pop’s economy of newness. Masculinity is not refreshed through reinvention but stabilised through a code designed to endure. Mark Farrow’s framing intensifies that logic, cropping the body into formal signifiers and dividing access between Lowe’s direct gaze and Tennant’s closed-eyed withdrawal, so visibility is offered only on controlled terms.

This menswear logic was not confined to formal dress. Although black tie makes it especially clear, Lowe’s repeated use of a baseball cap and sunglasses belongs to the same system. Across different images, the effect is consistent: access to the face is reduced, expression is restricted, and the body is turned into a controlled public image. The point is not the individual garment, but the repeated use of menswear to manage visibility.

The graphic system is easier to see because Farrow made it so precise. Sleeves, typography, colour, image treatment, and composition were never incidental to the Pet Shop Boys project; they were the project’s primary means of self-management. What makes Farrow’s work so important is that it transformed graphic design from packaging into strategy. The menswear system is easier to miss because it works more quietly. Like much of menswear, it is designed not to announce itself but to stabilise the body through repetition, convention, and control. Farrow’s graphics and the group’s clothing therefore operated in parallel: one disciplining the image, the other disciplining the body. Together they establish the Pet Shop Boys image as something built not on disclosure, but on management.

The strength of those parallel systems is that, once established, they no longer depend on the body being constantly present. The body can disappear and the image still holds. When it returns, it does so only on tightly managed terms. Across their career, the Pet Shop Boys moved repeatedly between two ways of working within that system.

One was complete withdrawal. On covers such as Very, Electric, and Super, the body disappears altogether. There are no faces, poses, or expressions to read. Identity is carried instead by colour, texture, pattern, typography, and form. Very reduces the cover to an embossed orange surface. Electric replaces portraiture with an optical pattern. Super does the same through the album title set inside a circle, with shifting colour combinations across formats and platforms. The cover was designed to remain recognisable through variation. These are not just striking graphic moves. They show how completely the system can function without physical presence.

That is one of the great achievements of Farrow’s system. Most pop imagery still relies on the face or figure because the body is expected to carry identity, emotion, and the promise of access to the self. Pet Shop Boys built a visual language strong enough to do without either. The system itself became recognisable. Identity had been transferred elsewhere: into graphic form, into surface, into structure.

The other strategy allows the body to return, but only under conditions that restrict access. On Nightlife, the suited body is present, but the face is blurred into motion. The image offers visibility while denying clarity. That blur was not incidental. Farrow recalled that the unblurred photographs felt too intimate, and that adding the blur completely changed the image. That matters because it shows how consciously this distance was constructed. Farrow was not documenting the group, he was regulating proximity.

Fundamental returns to a move already visible on Please. Tennant and Lowe are present, but minimised and pushed deep into a near-total black field. Recognition remains possible, but the figures are denied visual dominance. Where Please uses white space to create cool restraint, Fundamental makes the same logic feel harsher and more absolute. The body has not disappeared, but it has been subordinated to the space around it.

Hotspot repeats that strategy in another register. The figures are there, but only as soft vertical traces within a blurred surface. Again, the image moves away from clarity rather than towards it, and even when the body comes back, it is not fully available.

What matters across these covers is not a single look but a repeated logic. Pet Shop Boys did not avoid change. They changed constantly, but always within a system strong enough to contain it. Sometimes the body disappeared into graphic form, at other moments it remained visible, but only at a distance: miniaturised, blurred, or obscured. In both cases the same principle held. Public appearance was permitted; full access was not.

Menswear remained central to that logic throughout. It was never just styling added to Farrow’s graphic system. It performed the same structural task, whether through tailoring and black tie or through Lowe’s cap, sunglasses, and more casual forms of dress. In each case, the body was made legible without being opened up. Graphic design and menswear were parallel systems doing the same work by different means.

Against a pop culture that often demanded display, access, and emotional legibility, Pet Shop Boys built a system that allowed them to be seen without being surrendered. That is what Volume makes so clear. This was never simply a style, but a method of self-protection: a way of holding the body at a distance while remaining unmistakably present.

Pet Shop Boys Volume is published by Thames & Hudson on 7 April 2026.

About the author

Andrew Groves is Professor of Fashion Design and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster. He writes weekly on menswear, archives, and systems, focusing on how authority and value are produced through clothing. andrewgroves.com

This newsletter examines how menswear operates as a system. Authority, credibility, and value are produced through use, regulation, and appearance.

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Look closely at these early twentieth-century police portraits and the surprise is not the crime, but the clothing. The men arrested for offences such as larceny appear before the camera dressed in collars, ties, jackets and hats, wearing the visual language of propriety and respectability. That is the contradiction at the centre of these images. Their recorded occupations place them firmly within the working class, but their clothing does not neatly match the social distinction later implied by the phrase white-collar crime. That tension is built into the record itself. Occupation appears alongside name, offence and physical description, making class part of the archive’s administrative logic.

When Edwin Sutherland coined the term white-collar crime in 1939, he used it to describe offences committed by apparently respectable people in the course of their work. The phrase was radical because it forced criminality and legitimacy into the same frame. But these photographs suggest that the relationship between appearance, class and criminality was already more unstable than the term implies. Long before white-collar crime became a recognised category, working-class men in the police archive were already wearing garments associated with respectability. The question, then, is not simply who committed crime, but how dress was used to distinguish one kind of offender from another, and what that distinction revealed about class, trust and legitimacy.

That asymmetry was not accidental. Working-class offending did not require a new metaphor in order to become legible. Theft, assault, burglary and disorder were already visible to police, courts and public discourse. They were already associated with working-class bodies and urban space. What lacked a name was harm committed within institutions organised around trust: corporations, banks, government offices and professional bodies. White-collar crime named that problem, not because such acts were new, but because the offender’s social position disrupted expectation.

By the early twentieth century, the white collar had already become shorthand for clerical and managerial labour. The garment mattered. Stiff, detachable and highly visible, it offered a quick visual claim to cleanliness, discipline and credibility. That appearance was not effortless. Keeping anything white required laundering, starching, pressing, time and often more than one collar in rotation. What looked like personal neatness depended on maintenance. What appeared to be individual respectability rested on material care and hidden labour.

By the time Sutherland coined white-collar crime, the phrase no longer referred simply to cloth. It referred to occupational status, institutional location and moral presumption. That was what made the concept radical. It challenged the assumption that crime belonged naturally to the street and therefore to the working class. It named the possibility that the trusted administrator, banker or executive could produce harm under the cover of legitimacy.

Yet the police archive shows that the collar had never belonged exclusively to that later social meaning. These are not ordinary portraits but standardised records of identification: a selection from an album of prisoners brought before the North Shields Police Court between 1902 and the 1930s. Front views, profile views, neutral backdrops, identification boards, typed descriptors. Each man is turned into information. Once inside that system, dress remains visible, but it does not protect. The tie, the jacket and the collar are still there, yet they are absorbed into a record of surveillance.

Many of the men charged with larceny, shopbreaking, and housebreaking are recorded as labourers, hawkers, carpenters, and draymen. They are unmistakably working class by occupation, but not neatly separable from respectable dress. By the interwar period, the suit and collar had diffused well beyond clerical or managerial work. A working-class man could appear before the camera in the same broad visual language of propriety and respectability. He could wear the clothes. What he could not necessarily claim was the insulation those clothes promised elsewhere.

That is why no one looking at these men would call them white-collar criminals, even when they wear collars.

The distinction was never simply in the clothes. It lay in the relation between clothing, occupation and institutional power. Sutherland’s category did not describe a shirt; it described a position. The law was not asking what a man wore; it was asking what authority his work conferred, what trust surrounded him, and what systems of legitimacy sheltered him from immediate suspicion.

This is why no equally powerful category of blue-collar crime emerged. It is not that working-class men never committed offences connected to labour, nor that nobody has ever used the phrase. It is that the term never acquired the same cultural necessity. Working-class crime did not require a new category to make it visible. It was already assumed. White-collar offending, by contrast, required a new category precisely because it unsettled established ideas about who looked like a criminal.

Once labour was categorised by collar colour, crime could be sorted along similar lines.

The history of menswear helps explain how that presumption worked. Clothes do not carry stable meanings on their own. Their force depends on who is wearing them, who is reading them and within what institutional setting. The same shirt and tie that might signify probity in one context can, in another, be stripped of that authority. The police photographs show this with brutal efficiency.

These photographs show that the collar never belonged exclusively to the social world later named by white-collar crime. What separates these men from the banker, administrator or executive is not dress alone, but the occupational and institutional position recorded beside it. A labourer in a collar who committed larceny remained legible as a working-class offender. A banker in a collar who committed fraud required a new category because his position disrupted assumptions about where crime properly belonged.

The collar might be shared. The protection it offered was not.

About the author

Andrew Groves is Professor of Fashion Design and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster. He writes weekly on menswear, archives, and systems, focusing on how authority and value are produced through clothing. andrewgroves.com

This newsletter examines how menswear operates as a system. Authority, credibility, and value are produced through use, regulation, and appearance.

Subscribe to receive one essay every Thursday.

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The myth of the rebellious art-school dropout obscures the fact that leaving was rarely a free choice.

Art education in post-war Britain operated as a system that distributed risk and regulated legitimacy. Art schools absorbed large numbers of students but only channelled a minority into recognised professional pathways. Leaving was common, but its consequences were unevenly distributed.

In mid-twentieth-century British art schools, failure was not exceptional. It was routine. What mattered was not simply whether a student failed, but what resources they possessed afterwards. The ability to turn failure into culture depended not on creativity alone, but on who could carry the cost.

Drawing on archival research into Westwood’s brief enrolment at Harrow in 1958, and a re-reading of Malcolm McLaren’s later experience at the same institution, this essay argues that failure operated as a sorting mechanism within art education. The institution did not simply cultivate artists. It regulated progression, stabilised reputations, and quietly shed those who could not remain inside the system.

Harrow School of Art did not primarily exist to cultivate individual artistic identity. It functioned as a vocational filtering system: absorbing large numbers, channeling a minority into recognised pathways, and shedding the rest with minimal institutional liability.

Working-class formation and material skill

Vivienne Westwood was born on 8 April 1941 in Glossop, Derbyshire, and grew up at 6 Mill Brook, a row of cottages between the villages of Hollingworth and Tintwistle.¹ Her mother worked in the local cotton mills as a weaver, while her father came from a family of shoemakers. From the outset, Westwood’s creative formation was embedded in a working-class culture of material skill, repair, and production rather than artistic vocation.

At the age of eight, Westwood attended her first sewing class, and by fourteen she recalled making “all my slinky evening dresses” herself.² Her aptitude was practical and applied. In 1953, her parents, Gordon and Dora Swire, acquired the Tintwistle Post Office, assuming joint postmaster roles. This move, and the later relocation to London, formed part of a post-war pattern of working-class mobility driven by necessity rather than cultural aspiration.

At Glossop Grammar School, Westwood completed her School Certificate. Her artistic potential was recognised by her art tutor, Mr Bell, who helped her assemble a portfolio and encouraged her to apply to art school in 1957.³ Entry into art education was not framed as self-expression, but as a possible route to paid work.

Relocation to London and the structure of Harrow

In 1958, the Swire family relocated to London, taking over the Post Office and general store at 31 Station Road, Harrow. This move placed Westwood within reach of a rapidly expanding art education system undergoing significant reform.

Following the 1946 restructuring of the Ministry of Education’s examination framework, British art schools introduced the Intermediate Certificate in Arts and Crafts and the National Diploma in Design (NDD). The NDD was explicitly vocational, designed to align artistic training with industrial and commercial employment rather than autonomous artistic practice.

This repositioned art schools as mediating institutions between state education and industry. Their function was no longer to sustain speculative practice indefinitely, but to regulate progression, standardise competence, and limit exposure to economic risk, primarily on behalf of the institution itself.

Westwood enrolled on the foundation course at Harrow Technical College and School of Art for the summer term from 14 April to 4 July 1958, having just turned seventeen.⁴ Harrow’s prospectus stated its aim was “to provide a sound practical training in all branches of Art”, encompassing painting, advertising design, illustration, textiles, costume drawing, dressmaking, millinery, lithography, embroidery, silversmithing, jewellery, pottery, and related crafts.⁵

Despite this breadth, the curriculum was tightly structured. The foundation year prioritised general knowledge, composition, design and crafts, and life drawing. Specialisation was limited to a single day per week. Progression required successful completion of the Intermediate Certificate, reinforcing a sequential model of training.

Harrow School of Art as an educational system

During Westwood’s enrolment, Harrow School of Art was staffed by a faculty whose authority reinforced the institution’s emphasis on discipline and formal competence. The Dean, Ken Illingworth, oversaw the school, while the foundation programme was led by Ivor Fox (1918–1983). Teaching staff included Sir Hugh Casson, Theodore Ramos, Peter Blake, Ken Howard, and Barry Fantoni, combining academic authority with emerging contemporary practices.⁶

This was not an environment hostile to creativity, but one that insisted legitimacy be earned through foundational skill rather than immediate production. Drawing functioned as a gatekeeping mechanism, regulating access to making.

Such gatekeeping did not merely train students; it protected the institution. By deferring making, narrowing progression, and enforcing sequential advancement, Harrow reduced reputational risk while externalising the cost of delay, boredom, or exit onto students themselves.

Westwood selected dress design as her specialist craft, taught by Maggie Shepherd, who also led the NDD in Dress Design. Shepherd had begun teaching at Harrow in 1949 while designing for wholesale manufacturers and private clients.⁷ By the late 1950s, her coats and suits were sold in the budget section of Woollands in Knightsbridge, positioning her as a model of commercially viable design practice.⁸ Westwood later recalled Shepherd as “quite famous”, and her trajectory may have appeared attainable within the constraints of the system.⁹

Frustration with curriculum and the problem of making

Despite her commitment to dressmaking, Westwood became frustrated by Harrow’s insistence on preparatory drawing. She recalled watching diploma students produce finished garments while she remained confined to observational exercises:

“…I saw the girls who had been exclusively with Miss Shepherd for two or three years and were doing their diploma and they made these dresses… I was just dying to make dresses.”⁹

Life drawing and still life dominated the curriculum, prioritising accuracy over application. Westwood later reflected:

“I had made my own clothes before… but you weren’t allowed to do it like that. You had to sit there and make drawings… I just got bored; I couldn’t stand not making anything.”⁹

Westwood transferred to the silversmithing course taught by Robert Edgar Stone.¹⁰ However, by July 1958, after a single term, she decided to leave Harrow entirely.

Leaving Harrow: failure as constraint

Westwood’s departure is often narrated as frustration or proto-rebellion. Her own accounts indicate something more structurally limited. In 2014, she explained:

“I was set on the idea that the only way to make a living in the arts was to sell paintings. I was just too working-class to see beyond that one stereotype”.¹¹

That summer, she saw an advertisement on the Underground for a Pitman’s shorthand course and resolved to earn the money to enrol, taking factory work at Kodak in Harrow.¹¹ She later trained as a teacher at St Gabriel’s Teacher Training College in Camberwell and secured a post at a primary school in Harlesden.¹²

Her exit from art school was not a strategic rejection of the system. It was an accommodation to its limits. Failure here did not generate cultural capital; it narrowed options and redirected labour.

For Westwood, failure was not an aesthetic position but an economic interruption. As a working-class woman, her exposure to risk was intensified by expectations around appropriate labour, stability, and respectability. What appeared institutionally as neutral attrition registered personally as constraint.

Subculture as alternative infrastructure

Outside art school, other cultural systems were already operating. Westwood’s involvement in subcultural networks intensified after meeting Derek Westwood in 1961. By the mid-1960s, the Railway Hotel in Harrow had become a hub for the local mod scene, hosting art students, musicians, and sharply dressed youths. The venue hosted The Who during a twelve-week residency in 1964, including Pete Townshend’s now-mythologised guitar smashing incident.¹³

Outside formal education, Westwood encountered a different system of validation, where style, performance, and participation carried immediate cultural value. This was not a rejection of structure, but an entry into an alternative one, governed by visibility, taste, and subcultural capital rather than institutional progression.

Subculture functioned here as a parallel infrastructure: informal, unstable, but capable of converting immediacy into meaning without requiring credentialed progression.

Malcolm McLaren and flamboyant failure

McLaren’s significance here lies not in his personality, but in what he demonstrates about the system. Malcolm McLaren enrolled at Harrow School of Art in autumn 1963. Fellow student Fred Vermorel later described Harrow as “the centre for miles around for bohemian frenzy”.¹⁴ McLaren encountered an environment in which provocation could be tolerated, noticed, and sometimes rewarded rather than curtailed.

His first teacher, Theodore Ramos, remembered him as “far more angry and intense than most of the students”.¹⁵ McLaren repeatedly recalled a formative lecture in which a tutor declared that all students would fail, urging them not merely to fail, but to become “flamboyant failures”, as this was “better than any kind of benign success”.¹⁶

Failure became a resource because he could afford to treat exit as rehearsal. He moved between institutions, sometimes enrolling under false names to access grants.¹⁷ The key point is not the anecdote but the buffer. His middle-class background reduced the consequences of institutional rupture, allowing failure to function as strategy rather than constraint.

The contrast between Westwood and McLaren is structural. Westwood’s failure required immediate economic recalibration. McLaren’s failure generated narrative, posture, and eventually authority. The same institution produced radically different outcomes because risk was not evenly distributed.

Their meeting in 1965 at the Railway Hotel brought these trajectories together. Harrow constrained one and enabled the other, yet its contradictions produced the conditions under which their collaboration later emerged. Failure did not disappear; it sorted.

Revisiting their experiences at Harrow School of Art complicates the familiar romance of the art-school dropout. Failure was not a shared creative condition; it was an uneven exposure to risk shaped by class, gender, and economic security. Westwood’s departure was structured by the practical limits of working-class mobility and the need for paid work. McLaren could perform failure as provocation because the downside was buffered. For Westwood, failure carried a cost.

The difference was not talent. It was who could afford to fail.

Footnotes

[1] Alexander Fury et al., Vivienne Westwood Catwalk: The Complete Collections, 1st edition (Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2021), 16.

[2] Marisa Meltzer, ‘Vivienne Westwood, 81, Dies; Brought Provocative Punk Style to High Fashion’, Fashion, The New York Times, 29 December 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/fashion/vivienne-westwood-dead.html.

[3] Vivienne Westwood and Ian Kelly, Vivienne Westwood (London: Picador, 2014), 70, http://archive.org/details/viviennewestwood0000west.

[4] Westwood and Kelly, Vivienne Westwood, 76.

[5] ‘Harrow School of Art Prospectus 1957-58’, Harrow College of Higher Education, 1957, https://access.westminster.arkivum.net/har-5-4-15.

[6] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography (Constable, 2020), 47.

[7] Westwood and Kelly, Vivienne Westwood, 76.

[8] Serena Sinclair, ‘The Smaller Woman Is in Luck, a Fellow Sufferer Is Bearing Her in Mind’, Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, 28 August 1961.

[9] Westwood and Kelly, Vivienne Westwood, 76.

[10] Elizabeth Lomas, Guide to the Archive of Art and Design, Victoria & Albert Museum (Taylor & Francis, 2001), 235.

[11] Westwood and Kelly, Vivienne Westwood, 79.

[12] Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming (Faber & Faber, 2011), 20.

[13] Scott Schinder and Andy Schwartz, Icons of Rock: An Encyclopedia of the Legends Who Changed Music Forever (ABC-CLIO, 2007), 253.

[14] Fred Vermorel and Judy Vermorel, Sex Pistols: The Inside Story (Omnibus Press, 2011), 214.

[15] Savage, England’s Dreaming, 42.

[16] Ian Macleay, Malcolm McLaren - The Biography: The Sex Pistols, the Anarchy, the Art, the Genius - the Whole Amazing Legacy (Kings Road Publishing, 2010), 30.

[17] ‘Malcolm McLaren: Punk? It Made My Day’, The Telegraph, 30 September 2007, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3668263/Malcolm-McLaren-Punk-it-made-my-day.html.

About the author

Andrew Groves is Professor of Fashion Design and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster. He writes weekly on menswear, archives, and systems, focusing on how authority and value are produced through clothing.

More: andrewgroves.com

This newsletter examines how menswear operates as a system.

Authority, credibility, and value are produced through use, regulation, and appearance.

Subscribe to receive one essay every Thursday.

Written for readers who want sustained analysis, not commentary.

Subscribe now

Share

Last Saturday I queued for ninety minutes to get into a pub.

Utopia, by Trackie McLeod, rebuilt a working men’s club inside Factory International, Manchester’s major contemporary arts institution. It ran as a functioning bar, pints were pulled and music played. There was a dartboard, a fruit machine, even a karaoke screen. The exhibition was built into its routines.

The Haçienda once promised a utopian space, where music and dress could reorganise class and culture, where architecture itself could redistribute belonging. Utopia inherits that promise, but under very different conditions.

Within minutes of the 3pm opening, the venue hit capacity, with around a hundred people still queuing on the stairs.

Saturday 3pm is usually kick-off time for the football, so in a traditional working men’s club you would already be inside. Here, entry was controlled through headcount. This ‘pub’ began with controlled entry, yet the queue revealed a desire for a room that felt social without feeling hostile.

The traditional working men’s club didn’t create anticipation; it was routine. Here, the wait became value. Access was staged; scarcity was produced.

Before you reached the bar, you were shown the bar. A monitor downstairs ran live CCTV from the pub upstairs. You stood in line watching drinkers on a split-screen feed. Through surveillance the room was visible before it was accessible. It could be simple crowd management, but it read as staging: surveillance as the first threshold.

Working men’s clubs were never neutral social spaces; they ran on codes: dress, accent, familiarity, allegiance. Clothing did the quiet work: no football colours, no workwear, smart casual only. What mattered was what it might signal: trouble, respectability, risk. Menswear operated as a low-tech surveillance system. It enabled judgement at a glance; men were sorted by what they wore.

That is what I have termed surveillance masculinity: a regime in which male dress makes the body legible in advance, signalling readiness, threat, discipline or self-control before any action occurs. The garment does not simply express identity; it anticipates suspicion.

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Released as part of Supreme’s A/W2016 season, this red clay brick sold out immediately and entered resale circulation within hours. Its value multiplied rapidly, despite having no use as clothing and no functional purpose beyond being recognised.

Menswear is often described as clothing. In practice, it operates as a system that organises value, recognition, circulation, and belonging. Garments are one output of that system, not its foundation. The brick exposes this by eliminating the garment altogether.

Bricks are among the most stable design objects in human history. They appear across cultures and geographies, and their basic form has remained largely unchanged for over six thousand years. This apparent neutrality hides a critical fact. The dimensions of a brick are not arbitrary; they are determined by the body. That stability makes the brick a reliable unit for thinking about systems rather than style.

A brick is sized to be lifted, carried, and placed repeatedly with one hand. Its effective width roughly matches the span between thumb and index finger of an adult male hand. Standard brick sizes emerge from what men can grip and endure over hours of repetitive work. Its design is labour translated into form: infrastructure scaled to the male hand.

This bodily logic makes the Supreme brick especially revealing. It does not enter the world through labour, construction, or endurance. It enters through a product drop, an online checkout, and online resale platforms. A unit built for physical work becomes a unit designed purely for circulation.

Twentieth century art identified this condition early. When Carl Andre arranged industrial firebricks into ordered configurations such as Equivalent VIII (1966), the bricks themselves went unchanged. No additional labour or craft was introduced. Meaning and value were produced entirely through placement, seriality, and institutional recognition. Andre’s work demonstrated that value could be generated without transformation, simply by assigning an object a position within a system.

The brick also carries a political history that complicates its neutrality. For the Situationist International, the brick was infrastructure turned against itself. The basic unit of our built environment could be repurposed as a weapon. The same object that stabilised the city could be pulled from the pavement and thrown back at it. Meaning depended not on form, but on how the object was used.

Supreme’s brick inherits none of this force. What it inherits is abstraction.

By the mid-2010s, menswear value had largely detached from wear. Online resale platforms made this development explicit. Objects gained worth through scarcity, speed, and recognisability rather than durability, fit, or performance. Items circulated independently of bodies. Visibility replaced use as the primary measure of value.

The Supreme brick operates perfectly within this economy. It has extremely low intrinsic value, yet functions efficiently as a tradable unit. This is the logic of fungibility: a low-value object whose worth depends entirely on exchange.

This is why the brick’s uselessness as a menswear accessory is not a flaw. It is the point. A luxury watch still relies on precious materials. A bespoke suit still relies on labour and fit. The brick relies on neither. It communicates only literacy. It signals that the owner understands how the system works.

Comparisons to the readymade are therefore structural rather than stylistic. When Marcel Duchamp designated an everyday object as art, the object itself did not change. The system around it did. Value was reassigned through context and authorisation rather than use. Menswear arrives at the same designation not through institutions, but through markets.

Supreme’s broader catalogue of non-wearable objects makes this logic explicit. Tools, domestic items, sporting equipment, even vehicles such as dirt bikes and kayaks. These are not jokes scattered through a clothing range. They function as system tests. Each object asks the same question. How far can value detach from use and still circulate successfully?

The answer, repeatedly, is very far.

The Supreme brick is not significant because it is ironic or provocative. It is significant because it shows the menswear system can operate without garments.

The brick therefore does not parody menswear, it clarifies it. It demonstrates that garments are no longer required for the system to function. Circulation, recognition, and exchange are sufficient.

Menswear has always been infrastructural. It has organised bodies in relation to weather, labour, discipline, and authority. Gabardine stabilised bodies under exposure. Hi-visibility clothing stabilises bodies under surveillance. The brick stabilises value inside a system that no longer requires use.

This is not a break from menswear’s history, but its logical extension.

To understand contemporary menswear, it is no longer enough to look at what is worn. Track what circulates.

This newsletter examines how menswear operates as a system.

Authority, credibility, and value are produced through use, regulation, and appearance.

Subscribe to receive one essay every Thursday.

Written for readers who want sustained analysis, not commentary.

Subscribe now

About the author

Andrew Groves is Professor of Fashion Design and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster. He writes weekly on menswear, archives, and systems, focusing on how authority and value are produced through clothing.

More: andrewgroves.com

Subscribe now

Share

Below it, a line drawing of a soldier stands annotated like an anatomy chart. Lid. Grid. Arm size. Piss tank size. A human eye hovers to one side, labelled: What’s this fella all about? At the bottom, the Army’s official slogan is reworked into an unofficial creed: Look good. Feel good. Fight good.

For anyone outside the forces, it reads as absurd. For those within, it is immediately legible. The poster captures a system that has shaped generations of British soldiers. Allyness. The quiet discipline of looking ready. It is a system that emerges precisely when regulation lags and consequences move faster than command.

Allyness is often misunderstood as style or vanity. It is neither. It’s the visible residue of competence, accumulated over time. It is a compensatory system. A way of restoring judgement when formal systems cannot keep up with risk. A way of making capability visible when the consequences of failure are immediate and physical. It operates alongside rank and regulation, but it does different work. Where formal systems certify authority, allyness tests credibility.

The term “ally” emerged in post-war British military life, especially among the Parachute Regiment, Royal Marines, and later the SAS. To call someone ally was to say they looked right. Squared away. Capable. Calm under pressure. Some traced the term to “allied up”, others to alignment with elite units — but its origin mattered less than its function. Allyness was awarded horizontally, not issued from above. It was recognition from peers who knew what to look for.

That recognition lived in detail, but it was never a checklist. Allyness was built through small, cumulative acts, field-smart adjustments passed down through units, not rulebooks: cutting down webbing to reduce snagging, taping over buckles to kill shine, shaping berets tight to the temple, sewing in map pockets, blacking out brass, marking kit discreetly. None of this was required. All of it mattered, because it signalled experience rather than purchase.

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Last week’s essay traced how early Burberry treated weather as a problem of governance rather than image. Performance was not assumed. It was earned through repeated exposure. Authority accumulated slowly, through continuity under pressure. Clothing proved itself by stabilising bodies over time.

This essay begins where that logic breaks down.

Released late last year, this Moncler advert features Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, actors whose authority no longer depends on demonstration. Performance is assumed in advance. That same logic is transferred onto the jackets. The garments do not need to behave under exposure, instead they borrow credibility from bodies whose competence is already established.

This is true of actors whose careers are settled enough that no single role needs to prove anything. Their performance exists in advance of the work. Presence alone carries authority.

It is also true of much contemporary performance clothing that does not need to show how it performs. They carry a visual history of exposure, endurance, and technical competence that no longer has to be activated. Nothing is being tested, nothing is at risk. And yet performance is understood to be there.

It is not immediately clear whether the portrait by photographer Platon asks us to read this as a story about people or garments. That uncertainty matters. Clothing and character are both treated as already credible; proof is no longer necessary.

From Proof to Assumption

In earlier systems of performance clothing, proof was explicit. Garments earned trust by behaving under pressure, repeatedly, inside environments that punished failure. Authority accumulated through use. Performance was something demonstrated over time, not claimed in advance. This was the logic that underpinned early Burberry. Weather functioned as the test system in which reliability was non-negotiable.

Much contemporary performance wear operates differently. Technical credibility now arrives already in place. The visual language of function stands in for behaviour. Seam tape, insulation, articulation, and protection no longer need to be tested to be believed. They only need to be recognised.

Visual signifiers of function, such as baffling, bulk, quilting, glossy shells, badge-work, and zipped pockets, all carry with them the iconography of protection.

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Burberry wasn’t built on fashion. It was built on exposure. Before the trench coat became a symbol, the job was simple: keep bodies operational in weather that could halt work, travel, and command.

Weather is not neutral.

By the late nineteenth century in Britain, it had become measurable, reportable, and actionable at scale. Through coordinated observation, telegraphic communication, and state infrastructure, weather was reframed as something that could be monitored, anticipated, and warned against.

Burberry’s early success is inseparable from that shift. If menswear operates as infrastructure, this is what it looks like when that logic becomes material.

While weather itself cannot be controlled, its effects on bodies, labour, and movement are increasingly treated as a problem of management rather than fate. Bodies moving through space are expected to remain functional despite rain, wind, and cold. This shift changes what protection means. Clothing is no longer just shelter. It becomes part of the apparatus that stabilises labour, travel, and authority.

Early Burberry did not operate as a fashion house responding to taste. It functions as a supplier to systems that require bodies to perform reliably under exposure. Its problem is not style but continuity. How to keep bodies operational when weather threatens to interrupt movement, labour, or command.

The men addressed by Burberry in this period are not consumers seeking novelty. They are soldiers, explorers, civil servants, sportsmen, travellers. Their requirement is not expression but reliability. Clothing is expected to absorb environmental uncertainty without drawing attention to itself. Failure is not aesthetic. It is systemic.

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Prada’s Autumn/Winter 2026 menswear show didn’t look new. The clothes arrived scuffed and stained, their surfaces deliberately unsettled. Edges were worn back to expose the material beneath. The collection presented garments not at the beginning of their lives, but staged to appear as if they had already been worn.

That appearance matters because real wear is not an effect. It is a record. It accumulates evidence through labour, repetition, constraint, repair and time. Creases, stains, and abrasion register bodies that have occupied garments day after day. Wear is biographical. It is inseparable from class because it emerges from necessity rather than choice.

The show worked hard to detach wear from that reality. This is not a question of intention; it is a question of function.

The venue made the mechanism visible. The Deposito of the Fondazione Prada was staged as a cutaway interior: stacked wall panels, blocked-in doors, false windows, fireplaces and panelling bolted into a single hall. Seams and joins were left exposed. The lighting grid sat overhead in full view. The room performed decay as set dressing. The runway floor looked spotless; a pale carpeted path of control running through a fabricated dereliction.

That contrast is the key. Degradation was permitted only on the clothes. The system surrounding them remained perfectly ordered. Lighting, seating, choreography, timing and photography functioned with institutional precision. Nothing in the environment suggested labour, fatigue or risk. The setting did not ask the audience to see garments damaged by life. It instructed them to read damage as culture.

The close-up images confirm this. Exposed edges were deliberate and controlled. Stains were distributed with care. Fabric looked weathered but never structurally compromised. The illusion of decay was tightly managed. These garments recorded no use. They required no endurance. They belonged to no one. They remembered nothing.

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Last week I argued that hi-vis is infrastructure, not fashion. It regulates risk, organises behaviour, and keeps systems functioning. That logic does not stop at workwear. It runs through everything that men wear.

In schools, gyms, offices, building sites, and barracks, clothing exists to make bodies legible inside systems that depend on predictability. These garments do not ask who you are. They assign what you are for. They reduce friction, limit interpretation, and allow institutions to function without constant negotiation.

Menswear rarely operates as expression. It operates as stabilisation.

That’s why it changes slowly. And why, when it does change, the changes are often absorbed rather than noticed. Stability, not innovation, is the measure of success.

It’s also why menswear is frequently misread. It’s still analysed using the tools of runway fashion: novelty, authorship, seasonal disruption, and visual impact. But it’s judged less by difference than by reliability. In many contexts, novelty actively undermines its purpose.

Workwear that draws attention undermines function.
A uniform that invites individuality weakens authority.
An office suit that resists standardisation undermines hierarchy.

Menswear succeeds when it disappears into use, when it becomes habitual, when it stops being remarked upon at all. That disappearance is not accidental; it’s structural.

When Infrastructure Fails

Infrastructure is designed to go unnoticed until it fails: roads, signalling systems, timetables, power grids. You don’t experience them so much as operate within them. Only absence, delay, or breakdown makes them visible.

Menswear operates in the same way. When it functions, it disappears into routine. When it fails, the failure is social before it is aesthetic. Authority slips, belonging fractures, behaviour is exposed.

Understanding menswear as infrastructure helps explain why it has historically been undervalued within fashion discourse. Its value is often not visual. It lies instead in repetition, durability, compliance, and habit. These qualities resist spectacle. Their significance accumulates slowly over time through use.

This is also why menswear is difficult to exhibit and archive within conventional fashion frameworks. Museums and brands often prioritise exceptional garments, moments of rupture, or named designers. Menswear, by contrast, accumulates meaning through consistency. Its authority builds slowly through use, not through display.

This is not a weakness. It is the point. Once menswear is understood as infrastructure, the questions we ask about it change.

Not who designed it, but what system required it.
Not what it looks like, but what it regulates.
Not what it expresses, but what it enables.

This shift matters for how menswear is designed, narrated, collected, and governed. When it is treated as style alone, it is misread. When it is understood as infrastructure, its persistence becomes legible.

It also becomes clear why so much of menswear’s real work happens outside the garment itself. Menswear inherits these systems from military and institutional clothing: procurement specifications, standard-issue sizing, inspection routines, and replacement cycles. They are not secondary to menswear. They are the mechanism through which it functions.

It circulates less through image than through instruction, and less through aspiration than through regulation. It depends on standards that keep clothing consistent across time and space. In that sense, the garment is only one component within a wider operational structure.

Archives as Operating Manuals

This is why archives matter. Not as repositories of spectacular garments, but as records of how systems functioned. Catalogues, manuals, order books, and trade literature show menswear doing its real work: organising bodies, managing risk, and stabilising behaviour.

Seeing menswear this way also reveals how fragile these systems are. Infrastructure only appears natural because of the labour required to maintain it. Once that labour becomes visible, the neutrality of the system begins to collapse. Menswear’s apparent simplicity hides an enormous amount of coordination. Understanding menswear as infrastructure does not make it more expressive or more fashionable. It makes it legible. It clarifies why certain garments persist, why others fail, and why change is so often resisted.

It also reframes heritage as operational knowledge rather than narrative. The past matters in menswear because systems retain and reproduce what works.

Which brings us to Burberry. If menswear operates as infrastructure, then Burberry’s early twentieth-century catalogues are not branding exercises but operating manuals. The pages organise clothing by task, terrain, and bodily exposure: leg-gear for shooting, riding, walking, cycling. Each item is isolated, numbered, priced, and described in terms of function. Protection, coverage, fastening, durability.

The body is broken down into zones. Risk is localised. Solutions are modular. You do not buy an outfit. You select components designed to manage specific conditions. Weather, labour, movement, and authority are treated as variables to be controlled.

These catalogues show how clothing was systematised to work at scale. Not to express identity, but to keep bodies operational in environments that could not afford failure.

Next week’s essay reads these catalogues as evidence rather than image: how material, structure, classification, and standardisation kept bodies functional within systems that depended on consistency.

But this is not only historical.

Once menswear is understood as infrastructure, its failures become easier to see. When systems falter, clothing stops being invisible. When maintenance breaks down, garments reappear, not as style, but as evidence.

Menswear’s hidden operating system is designed to keep it invisible when things are working. It becomes visible only when that system begins to fail.

This newsletter examines how menswear operates as a system.

Authority, credibility, and value are produced through use, regulation, and appearance.

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Written for readers who want sustained analysis, not commentary.

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About the author

Andrew Groves is Professor of Fashion Design and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster. He writes weekly on menswear, archives, and systems, focusing on how authority and value are produced through clothing.

More: andrewgroves.com

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The first week back at work always feels slightly brutal. You feel it in your clothes before you feel it anywhere else.

The tracksuits, hoodies and dressing gowns that carried us through that strange, suspended week between Christmas and New Year are put away. They are replaced by garments built not for comfort, but for function. Commutes restart. Offices refill. Shops, schools, construction sites and warehouses snap back into motion. The system switches itself back on, sorting bodies into roles through what they wear.

And if there is one garment that marks that shift more clearly than any other, it is hi-vis.

You see it before you register it: on building sites, along roadsides, on rail platforms. Fluorescent yellow threaded through the city.

But no one really sees them.

Hi-vis is the most conspicuous part of our visual environment, yet also the easiest to ignore. You see it without really registering it. It sits in the background, doing its job. Built to attract attention, but worn by people who often attract none.

Safety Systems Don’t Ask Questions

Hi-vis clothing exists to stabilise behaviour. It’s not fashion, it’s infrastructure. It signals roles, enforces boundaries, reduces risk. Whether on a building site or a motorway, it sends the same message: I belong here, you don’t. That’s the sleight of hand. Hi-vis doesn’t just control visibility, it controls recognition. The body is categorised before it’s encountered. You are not met as a person, but processed as a function.

The garment works precisely because it discourages attention. Fluorescence creates instant legibility without inviting engagement. It allows the system to operate smoothly while the individual fades out.

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New Year’s Day is meant to feel like a reset. The calendar turns, and we are invited to believe that the world has moved forward together, that time has restarted cleanly. That belief only works if time is still shared. When it isn’t, that belief becomes a fiction.

For most of our lives, the world has run on a single, shared clock. You felt it without ever needing to name it. Television schedules, working hours, football seasons, deliveries, release dates. Everything happened in a predictable sequence. You might have lived in a different place, but you were still living in the same time. That system, the one that held the modern world together, has begun to fail. What people are experiencing now is the collapse of global time.

Global time is not ancient. It was built in the late nineteenth century, when railways and the telegraph made local time unworkable. Every town once kept its own clock. Noon in one city could be several minutes different from the next. Industrialisation could not run on that, so nations aligned their time. In 1884, the world agreed on a single Prime Meridian, international time zones, and the temporal grid that made modern industry, transport, communication, and global trade function. It was quiet infrastructure. Without it, the twentieth century would not have worked.

That infrastructure is now coming apart, and you see it first in culture. Releases no longer arrive as shared moments. A show drops and there is no shared moment around it. Some watch immediately, others have to wait, and some cannot access it at all. By the time you talk about it, you are either too early, too late, or speaking into silence. The release still exists, but the shared moment has gone. The cultural clock has slipped out of alignment.

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At Christmas, men get socks. They’re the safe gift: practical, predictable, almost designed to be dismissed. But Christmas is also the day that “background” clothing becomes visible. Shoes come off. Feet go up. The domestic setting turns the hidden layer into the surface.

Which is why it matters that the British Sock Fetish Council emerged in the dead week between Christmas and New Year. In the UK, that stretch is oddly suspended: work stops, boredom sets in, and football fixtures stack up, and men start wearing the new clobber. Socks, freshly gifted, suddenly become visible. The timing wasn’t incidental.

The BSFC was formed in the dull lull between Christmas and New Year in 2011, on Twitter. It began as an in-joke between a few football casuals comparing socks, with “fetish” acknowledging a shared obsession with one-upmanship and dress. What started between friends quickly spread. People asked to join. Membership cards were printed. The joke hardened into a pattern: the same framing, the same cropping, the same signals.

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You start with a cloth, a tin of polish, and a surface that refuses to shine unless you work for it. Bulling boots is a small, repetitive task often seen as an outdated drill that belongs to the barracks or the parade ground rather than the present day. Yet it is in these smaller rituals that you glimpse how men are shaped. If you want to understand habit, discipline, character, and what remains in the body long after the institution has been left behind, you don’t start with the big events.

Bulling might look like a minor detail, but it runs through a full male life cycle in this country. It begins in childhood uniforms and spreads outward. Scouts learn a rough version during checks that teach order rather than achievement. Cadets take it more seriously, usually in cold halls filled with shouted instructions. In the armed forces, it becomes part of parade-ground discipline, a craft aimed at inspection, where a mirror toe stands in for discipline. Outside the forces, the habit doesn’t disappear. It travels with men into civilian life, carried into roles where appearance is read as competence, steadiness, and control. It looks minor, but it crosses more institutions than most garments ever do.

Thin Layers Only

Despite this wide reach, the method itself barely changes. A cloth wrapped tightly around the fingers. A little polish taken from the tin with care. The key instruction is always the same: thin layers only. You never smear or coat. You place. You repeat. You build a shine that starts invisibly and appears only after long work. Anyone who has ever been taught properly knows that the shine is the result of accumulated accuracy, not strength. You learn quickly that rushing does nothing except undo the last ten minutes you spent building the surface.

It’s the repetition that shapes you. The body is trained through repeated effort. Bulling concentrates that principle into a few square inches of leather. A controlled movement carried out so many times that it settles into the hand’s memory rather than remaining a conscious act.

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