Contemporary British Menswear: Hybridity, Flux and Globalisation

This chapter explores the ways in which diverse influences from around the globe inflect on contemporary British menswear design.

Men’s fashion, has been dominated by three major tendencies in recent years. Firstly, increasing globalisation, as East Asian and (latterly) African menswear consumption has grown rapidly, as designers from these regions have found international fame, and as British designers have increasingly drawn on menswear forms originating outside Europe. Secondly, the growing porosity between sportswear and tailored garments has represented a highly significant shift in contemporary men’s fashion. This development points both to changing patterns of labour and to a new role for the suit as glamorous occasion wear (rather than an understated corporate uniform). And thirdly, as this chapter will show, an increasingly questioning approach to what contemporary masculinity could or should look like is reflected in daring, decorative and body-conscious men’s dress.

Fashion practitioners draw on the stylistic influences that surround them to inform their work: clothing as worn on the street and on the dance floor; the utilitarian outfits of police and security guards; the unexpected ways that people mix together second-hand garments. In this way, British menswear represents a space in which some of the most profound ontological questions of this contemporary moment are posed: what does it mean to be British? And what does it mean to be a man?