The Meaning of Style

Styled Men opens with a question rather than a wardrobe. Hanan, who founded the magazine, talks to Kai about what a man wears, why he chooses it and what those choices end up saying about him.

“Ask ten men to describe someone they know with real style and almost none of them will begin with the clothes. They will say he’s calm. He always looks like himself. He never seems to be trying. Only later, and usually with some effort, will they get around to the navy jacket or the shoes that have clearly been resoled more than once.”

“That gap is interesting. What a man wears can be listed. What people actually perceive when they see him resists the list entirely. Two men can own more or less the same wardrobe and produce completely different impressions with it, and neither of them can point to the garment responsible.”

Kai: “Let’s start with what you just described. When you say a man has style, what are you actually noticing? Be honest, is it the clothes?”

Hanan: “Almost never the clothes first. I notice something more like agreement. The man and what he’s wearing seem to be in the same conversation. There is no gap between them.”

“It’s easier to see when it fails. You can spot a man who is wearing something rather than living in it within seconds. He touches it. He checks the cuff. He stands slightly differently to how he stands in the queue for coffee on a Tuesday. Nothing is wrong with the jacket. Something is wrong with the arrangement.”

Kai: “So what is personal style then, if it isn’t the clothes?”

Hanan: “I keep trying to answer that cleanly and I never manage it.”

“The closest I get is this: personal style is the set of decisions a man has stopped having to make. Everybody accumulates preferences. Most men never notice they have them. At some point you have worn enough things, and paid enough attention, that the choosing gets quiet. You know that you like a heavier trouser, you know that shirts in that particular blue make you look ill, you know you will always reach for the same jacket when you have not slept.”

“That is not fashion knowledge. It’s closer to self-knowledge with a wardrobe attached.”

Kai: “Can it be learned?”

Hanan: “Yes, but not in the way people want to learn it. They want the shortcut, the list, the five rules. I understand the appeal. I would have bought that list at twenty-two.”

“It’s learned by wearing things and paying attention to what happens. That is the whole method and it’s boring, which is why nobody sells it. You wear a coat for two winters and you discover you never fasten the top button. That tells you something about the coat and something about you. Do that for fifteen years and you have style. Do it for two weeks and you have a receipt.”

Kai: “Where does fashion sit in that? People use fashion and style as if they were the same word.”

Hanan: “Fashion is a supply. It’s vocabulary, silhouettes, cloth, colour, ideas about proportion, a running argument about what a man might look like this year. It’s genuinely useful and I am not interested in pretending otherwise. Without it we would all be dressing in a vacuum.”

“Style is what you keep. Fashion offers you fifty things and you take three, and then you find out over several years whether those three were actually yours or whether you were just in the room when they were being handed out.”

“The difference is time. Fashion is a conversation happening in public, right now. Style is private and it moves slowly.”

Kai: “There’s a certain kind of man who insists he isn’t interested in fashion at all. Same jacket, same boots, no logos, quite proud of it. Isn’t refusing fashion just another fashion?”

Hanan: “Partly. I want to agree with you but not completely.”

“It’s true that anti-fashion is still a position taken in relation to fashion. If you are defining yourself by what you refuse, you are still being organised by the thing you refuse. And that man usually knows exactly what he’s signalling. The plainness is doing work.”

“But I would not put him in the same category as someone chasing every drop. He has at least made a decision and stayed with it, and staying with something is most of how style gets built. He might have arrived at plainness for bad reasons and ended up somewhere real.”

Kai: “Let’s talk about presence, because it comes first in how you describe this magazine. Why do some men look completely right in very ordinary clothes?”

Hanan: “Because they are not waiting to be looked at.”

“That is really it. A man in a grey jumper and dark trousers who is fully occupied with what he’s doing reads as certain. The clothes disappear into him. Another man in the same grey jumper who is monitoring the room reads as uncertain, and the jumper becomes visible, and once clothing becomes visible in that way it starts to look like a claim.”

“Movement is part of it too. How a man sits down. Whether he can put his hands in his pockets without disturbing the whole arrangement. Whether he looks the same from behind as he does from the front, which almost nobody thinks about.”

Kai: “Can clothing be technically perfect and still fail?”

Hanan: “Constantly. I was at a wedding some years ago, and there was a man there in a beautiful suit. Genuinely beautiful. Everything correct, shoulders right, trousers breaking exactly where they should. He looked like he was carrying it rather than wearing it. All night.”

“Two seats away there was an older man in a jacket that was slightly too big in the body, and he was the one you noticed. He had clearly had it a long time. He ate, he laughed, he leaned back, he did not think about it once.”

“Perfect fit is a technical achievement. Presence is a relationship. They are not the same thing and one does not produce the other.”

Kai: “What does a man’s clothing communicate before he speaks?”

Hanan: “Less than we think and more than we admit. It does not communicate character. It communicates effort and where the effort was spent.”

“People read whether you have thought about this at all. They read whether you have thought about it too much. They read whether your clothes belong to the same period of your life as your face does, which sounds cruel but is a real thing men can feel without naming it.”

Kai: “Are men dressing for themselves or for other people?”

Hanan: “For other people. I do not believe the men who say otherwise, or rather I think they mean something slightly different and are using the wrong words.”

“Clothes are worn in public. That is the entire point of them beyond warmth. So the honest question is not whether you are dressing for others but which others. Are you dressing for people who already know you, or for a room you have imagined, or for a version of yourself you have not become yet? Dressing for people who know you tends to produce better results. The imagined room tends to produce expensive mistakes.”

Kai: “At what point does caring about appearance tip into insecurity?”

Hanan: “Caring is not the problem. Men are told that caring is unmanly and it’s nonsense, and it produces a lot of badly dressed people defending themselves.”

“The tell is whether the caring stops at the door. If you thought about it in the morning and then forgot about it, that is style. If you are still managing it at three in the afternoon, checking your reflection in shop windows, adjusting things, that is something else. Not a moral failure, just a signal that the clothes are doing a job they can’t really do, which is making you feel like enough.”

“Confidence has no maintenance schedule. Trying to look confident has one, and it runs all day.”

Kai: “What is the first thing you remember consciously caring about?”

Hanan: “A white T-shirt from Greenpeace with lots of colours printed on it. I bought it in a little fair-trade retail shop in my neighbourhood when I was fourteen or fifteen. At that time I worked there as a volunteer and I wore it until the colours went soft and grey. And now, almost 40 years later, it’s still in my wardrobe, but I haven’t worn it for 30 years.”

“I didn’t care about clothes before that. I cared about that T-shirt because of the other people there, who were a few years older than me and worked there as volunteers. They were completely at ease. I didn’t understand at that age that their ease had nothing to do with the clothes. I thought that if I found my version of their clothes, I would somehow get whatever it was they had.”

Kai: “Did you copy them?”

Hanan: “Badly. For about a year I wore T-shirts that were way too big for me, that didn’t suit me at all, and dressed the way they dressed, which at fifteen looked very wrong.”

“But everyone starts by imitating. There is no other way in. You take somebody’s whole look because you can’t yet see which parts are load-bearing.”

“It becomes your own when you start changing things for practical reasons rather than aesthetic ones. I dropped the white with colours because I look better with less colours, I kept wearing T-shirts because it turned out I actually liked them. That is the moment imitation quietly turns into something else. Not a decision, more like erosion.”

Kai: “Was there a period where you got it wrong?”

Hanan: “My mid-thirties, comprehensively. Very pointed shoes. A suit with purple lining, because someone told me lining was where you showed personality, which I now think is the saddest sentence in menswear. A large coat that only worked if I stood still and did nothing, and I bought it in a city where it rains constantly.”

“The worst of it was not the individual items. It was that I was buying for a life I did not have. Dinners I was not going to, a version of my week that existed only in the shop. I had a wardrobe suited to a man with a different job and a different diary.”

Kai: “What has gone from your wardrobe since?”

Hanan: “Anything I have to plan my day around. Anything I would need to grow into. Slimmer trousers, because I walk a lot and I got tired of negotiating with my own clothes. Statement outerwear, which I now think is mostly a way of arriving somewhere before you have said anything.”

“I have fewer colours than I did and better shoes. I care much more about how something moves and much less about how it photographs.”

“It gets simpler with age, but I would resist the idea that it gets simple. It gets more specific, which looks like simplicity from the outside. I am fussier now about a collar shape than I ever was about a whole outfit at twenty-five.”

Kai: “You travel a lot. What has that done to how you dress?”

Hanan: “More than anything else, honestly.”

“Bali did the most, and not in the way people expect. Nobody came back with a sarong. What I noticed was that formality there is expressed through completely different signals. In Belgium formality is layers. More layers, more serious. In that heat layers are impossible, so seriousness gets carried by cleanliness, by pressed clothes, by how a man’s hair is cut. I spent more time in barber shops there and the level of attention is a different order to anything I grew up with. Grooming is not vanity in that context. It’s politeness.”

Related Article · LifestyleMore Than a Shave: Conversations with a Barber in BaliA traditional shave in Bali becomes a reflection on routine, trust and the quiet bond between a barber and customer in the heart of Kuta.→

“The other thing was footwear. I had absorbed the idea that sandals were unserious, which turns out to be a rule invented by people living in the rain. Watching men conduct actual business in sandals adjusted something in me permanently. Not that I now wear sandals to meetings in Brussels. But I stopped believing my rules were rules.”

“Climate does most of this work and we underestimate it. Light changes what colour means. A green that looks alive under that sun looks like an army surplus mistake under a Belgian October sky. Food and movement matter too, in ways that sound trivial and are not. If you eat outdoors, if you are on and off a scooter, your clothes need to survive being touched. Clothing that requires stillness only exists in cold, indoor, seated cultures.”

“You don’t copy the place. You take the question the place asks and bring it home.”

Kai: “What does a normal week actually look like for you, and does your wardrobe match it?”

Hanan: “It matches it much better than it used to. A normal week is working at my laptop, a lot of reading, trains, rain about half the time when I’m in Belgium, enjoying the sun when I’m in Bali, and walking in between. It isn’t glamorous and there is no reason it should be dressed as if it were.”

“So: clothes that can be worn three days running and trousers I can walk in all day. Shoes I can walk four kilometres in.”

“Money comes into it in a way people are strange about. I would rather spend forty euros getting something altered properly than another three hundred on the next thing. Alterations are the most underrated purchase in menswear by a distance. A jacket that fits your actual shoulders will beat a more expensive jacket that fits a hypothetical man every time.”

Kai: “Why do some garments stay meaningful for years while others disappear immediately?”

Hanan: “Repetition, mostly. Things become yours by being worn, not by being bought.”

“I have some clothes I have for many years. They are objectively less perfect than the day I got them and they are worth more to me every year.”

“That is not sentimentality about objects. It’s that these clothes have been present for enough of my life to have stopped being a decision. I don’t evaluate them any more. I do not see it. That is the point at which something has become part of how you look rather than something you are wearing, and it can’t be bought, only accumulated.”

“The things that disappear tend to be things that were interesting rather than useful. Interesting has a short life.”

Kai: “What did you once believe about style that you no longer believe? And is there something you notice in other men now that you did not notice before?”

Hanan: “I used to believe fit was everything. I said it constantly. Get the fit right and the rest follows. I no longer think that is true. Fit is a floor, not a ceiling. Plenty of men are perfectly fitted and completely absent.”

“I also believed a man should have a signature. One thing that is his. I now think that is a trap. It turns you into a person maintaining a costume, and the moment your life changes you are stuck defending a decision you made at thirty.”

“What I notice now, and did not at all before: whether a man’s clothes are the same age as he is. Not how old the garments are, whether they belong to the same era of his life. A man dressed exactly as he was in his twenties reads as slightly stopped. And I notice shoes, obviously, but really the condition of them rather than the quality. Worn and cared for tells you more than expensive.”

Kai: “Presence. Menswear. Style. Why in that order?”

Hanan: “Because that is the order it happens in.”

“Presence is first because it’s what people register before they can name anything. It isn’t a mystical quality, it’s mostly comfort and attention. A man who is comfortable in what he has on and attending to something other than himself has presence, and you can feel it across a room before you could describe a single item he’s wearing.”

“Menswear is second because it’s the material. It’s the actual clothing, the trade, the cloth and the making, and I have no interest in floating above that. This is a magazine about clothes as well as ideas.”

“Style is last because it’s the result. It’s what those two things produce over years. Putting it first would suggest you can go and get it, which is what most of this industry implies and it isn’t true.”

Kai: “One restrained question about the magazine. What would you like a reader to notice differently after reading it?”

Hanan: “Something small. I would like a man to look at the three or four things he actually wears most weeks and ask why those, rather than looking at his wardrobe and seeing what is missing.”

“Most men know what they lack. Very few have looked properly at what they already return to. The answer is usually sitting there, worn at the elbows.”

Kai: “Last question. What is the meaning of style, to you, now?”

Hanan: “I would put it as a question rather than a definition, because I don’t think I am finished with it.”

“It’s whether the way you dress is keeping up with who you actually are. Not who you were at twenty-five, not who you plan to be when things settle down, not the man in the photograph you saved. The person doing your week.”

“Most men are wearing an answer to a question they stopped asking a long time ago. It might still be a good answer. That is worth checking, though, and you can check it in about a minute. Look at what you put on this morning and ask whether you chose it or whether it just survived.”

“If it was a real choice, you know more about your style than you think. If you can’t tell, that isn’t a failure either. It just means the question is still open, which in my experience it usually is.”