Sartorially Challenged Elon Musk Would Like To Share His Thoughts On Fashion With You
Once again, there is a reason we don't let the Right do art.
Exciting news, fashionistas! This week, Elon Musk stopped by Stephen Miller’s wife Katie Miller’s podcast, sporting some kind of Star Wars parody T-shirt and wearing a bomber jacket indoors, and decided to take a moment to complain about how other people are dressing.
His very hot take is that “fashion” hasn’t changed since 2015, that men’s fashion now is boring and not exciting like it used to be in the ‘70s or whatever, and that there is no unified, easily identifiable aesthetic like there was in other decades.
He said:
I just think like from a fashion standpoint, we should evolve. Um like my son Saxon said at one point, why does everything look like it’s 2015? And I was like, damn, things do, everything does look like it’s 2015. He’s like, if you took a picture from 2015 and said 2025, it looks exactly the same. There were stylistically things were the same as 2015. We have not we’ve not moved the needle in a decade.
“So what should it look like?” Miller asked.
Something new. You know, like the ‘60s had a definitive style. The ‘70s had a definitive style. The ‘80s had a definitive style. And then the ‘90s also had a different, had a style. But then you start looking at the 2000s and the 2010s and it’s like less and less every year. I think we should if our style I and and if you look at some of the older paintings um you know of past Cabinet secretaries um some of them like they look cool like their their jackets are cooler than what we have right now, you know they have sort of like a high collar and like a sort of I don’t know what some sort of what what do you call those things ascot or something like that, I mean it just looks cool like so. But we we don’t, everything’s like a very normal looking suit at this point. But like literally the same as 2015. I’m being generous because arguably the same as 2010.
So in 15 years, and I’m like, from a fashion standpoint, I don’t think we’ve moved since 2000 in 25 years. If you showed someone a picture of ‘this is a bunch of, this is a bunch of dudes in 2000. This is a bunch of dudes in 2025.’ Which year is which? So, I think we should I don’t know, spice it up a little.
Spice it up a little, people! For Elon! The guy wearing the most bland outfit humanly possible!
Now, there are always going to be people out there wearing jeans and T-shirts, as Musk is in that interview, and that’s fine. If that’s how people want to dress, more power to them. But that doesn’t mean that other people’s fashion hasn’t evolved. There is a ton of interesting and incredibly stylish (even spicy!) menswear right now (I’m loving the bold plaids and statement peacoats that are on trend for men right now), that surely Elon Musk, as the richest man in the world, could easily afford. If he wanted to get truly “spicy,” there’s the obvious option of Comme Des Garçons, the apocalypse-chic of KidSuper, the another-kind-of-apocalypse chic of Sacai, Dries Van Noten’s wild prints, or what Jonathan Anderson has been doing with Dior (so many capes!).
Hell, even if he wanted to stick to the all black thing … Rick Owens does exist.
But Elon Musk and his right-wing conservative pals are not out here wearing the interesting shit, both because they are boring and because they are afraid of looking gay.
To get serious for a moment, there has actually been far more variation in sartorial aesthetics in the last decade than usual, on both a micro (due to fast fashion) and macro (due to COVID) level. The athleisure and oversized looks that dominated the COVID era for functional reasons have more or less disappeared, and now some of us are stuck with a lot of absolutely enormous Free People fits that now feel just a tad dated. Makeup has evolved, from what people traditionally refer to as “2016 glam” (heavy contouring, bold eyeshadow with cut creases, visible highlighter) to the (problematic for reasons we won’t get into right now) “clean girl aesthetic” (“no makeup makeup”) and now we’re back to glam (thank God). Menswear has also changed quite a bit. I mean, when was the last time you saw a guy rocking a Beatles haircut and skinny jeans?
However, as I have a background in vintage clothing, I can tell you that fashion eras tend to turn more on the fives than on the zeroes — which is actually why it wouldn’t be weird for fashion, men’s fashion in particular, which evolves more slowly, to not substantially change from 2015 to now. What we think of as “The 50s,” aesthetically, is usually closer to 1955-1965. What we think of as “The 60s” is usually closer to 1965-1975, and so on. It’s never going to be perfectly lined up, of course, but you get the idea. It’s also usually the case that people don’t really see the aesthetics of an era while they are living it, because it always feels like “this is just what’s normal and what will definitely be normal forever.”
That being said! Elon Musk is a 54-year-old conservative who hangs around with other conservatives — people who tend to not exactly be on the cutting edge of, well, anything at all. Indeed, his replies are filled with people talking about how much they’d actually prefer to return to the 1950s or Little House on the Prairie times.
Or even — the horror — praising cargo shorts.
There’s also a lot of complaining about how the only “change” they see is that people are dressing like Millennials did 25-30 years ago. Wow! It’s almost as though that’s just how fashion works and has always worked. A trend is ubiquitous, becomes cringe, goes away for a couple decades and then comes back and becomes cool again because it suddenly feels transgressive and rebellious to rock it. (My personal theory has always been that this is because that is what becomes available en masse in thrift stores.)
How are these people going to know anything about what’s big in fashion or culture right now when they’re so busy whining that the culture needs to be the culture of 100 years ago and raging against any kind of change whatsoever?
Additionally, the aesthetics that most people think of when thinking of various other decades, particularly from 1965 onward, were rarely what everyone was actually wearing. They’re often thinking of flappers, hippies, people who went to discos, punks, new wavers, grunge kids, skaters, alternative kids, club kids, ravers, goths, hipsters, etc. — not so much the conservatives who were shaking their fists and clutching their pearls over how those subcultures were proof that humanity was doomed (and, with few exceptions, that men and women were being insufficiently masculine and feminine, respectively). There have obviously been some changes to how “normal” people dress over the years, but the variations have not been as extreme, particularly when it comes to menswear (the 1970s standing out in this regard). No one is going to a 1980s theme party dressed as Alex P. Keaton, unless they were lazy and just forgot to put together an actual costume.
The fact is, there is practically zero chance that anyone going around constantly freaking out about any and all social change, about trans people existing or drag queens telling stories or the Cracker Barrel logo or Calibri font or the importance of strict adherence to gender roles or changes in language or DEI or whatever is going to be at the forefront of fashion. Or music. Or art. Or theater. Or film. Incredibly enough, boring, bigoted people with small minds really don’t tend to create much culture, or even participate in it.
Usually, the best they can do is whine about how those who do create things aren’t creating the things they want, or are rudely creating things that do not comport with their religious beliefs.
It is true, of course, that we have much less of a monoculture these days than we once did, thanks to the internet. We’re not all listening to the same songs over and over on the radio anymore, we’re just going directly for what we want. We don’t all watch the same TV shows at the same time. While we have “influencers,” fashion and beauty magazines are no longer ubiquitous, dictating the official “ins and outs” of every season. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It doesn’t mean there aren’t trends (bows and pearls are everywhere right now, and I dare you to find a sweater that isn’t cropped) or that people don’t get creative with their style choices, because they absolutely do.
In fact, there’s a ton of room for all kinds of self-expression and creativity in the sartorial space these days, as well as a whole world of options beyond what people can find at their closest mall. Nothing is requisite or verboten, and I think that’s fucking awesome. You can have your barrel jeans and your Hailey Bieber-informed “clean girl aesthetic,” and I can have my seven-inch high Versace Mary Jane platforms (they were on clearance at Nordstrom Rack for $135!) and my Cruella lippie and we can both be happy. And we can mix them up if we like, because, fuck you, there are no rules.
Though I guess that’s not what you want when you are the kind of person who loves rules, feels the need to bend to authority and blend in with a crowd, and who is only comfortable when everyone looks the same, acts the same, and is the same.
Kind of like Republicans.
So I guess if Elon wants to really see some “spicy” fashion, he should stop being a closed-minded, ignorant fool who hangs around with other closed-minded ignorant fools … though that seems fairly unlikely.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Of course he has a son named "Saxon." Musk thinks he knows all the Angles
These are the platforms, should anyone care to take a moment to admire them.
https://editorialist.com/p/medusa-170mm-platform-pumps-versace-22357237