Current Affairs

Samuel Miller McDonald is a regular contributor to Current Affairs, where he has written about such disparate subjects as collectivism, the food system, Game of Thrones, cultural atrophy, ecofascism, His Dark Materials, the term "development," the history of oil, the fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson, the future of cities, and the forests of Madagascar. In our latest issue, Sam takes on one of his most challenging subjects yet: menswear. Sam is unapologetic about enjoying clothes, and showcases outfits on his "Mr. Clothes" account. But some on the left see men who like menswear as bourgeois, indulgent, even unethical. Must socialists wear overalls and Leninesque mariner's caps to be aesthetically authentic? Today we discuss Sam's argument, made eloquently in his print article, that clothes matter and there's nothing wrong with making yourself feel good by wearing nice clothes that you think look good. We discuss Twitter's "menswear guy," who has become infamous for savagely critiquing the attire of famous men (