Young Men's Fashion Guide

Young men's fashion is, at its simplest, clothing styles, footwear and accessories geared toward the youthful male population. Fashion itself is a popular style or practice, especially in clothing, footwear and accessories — and the young men's version of it can be casual street style looks, punk rock, polo shirts and everything in between. The style changes constantly, so it is important to watch for new trends all the time; this guide maps the movements that keep coming back, because they are the vocabulary every new trend is written in.

Young men are, on average, way trendier than older men. It is not always the case, but on average it holds — youth fashion is where experimentation is cheapest and the audience most forgiving. The companion warning matters just as much: if an older person dresses according to the fashion young people wear, he may look ridiculous in the eyes of both young and older people. If you dress outside of your age bracket, you do so at your own risk.

Hip Hop Fashion

Hip hop fashion, also known as big fashion, is a distinctive style of dress originating from inner-city youth on the scene of New York City, later followed by Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay Area, Detroit, Memphis, Virginia, Atlanta, St. Louis and others. Each city contributed various elements to its overall style, which is seen worldwide today.

Its menswear legacy is proportion and presence: oversized silhouettes, statement sneakers, bold logos and sportswear worn as streetwear. Hip hop is the clearest proof of this guide's central fact — young men's fashion is not designed in studios first. It starts as the dress of a specific place and generation, and the industry follows it around the world afterward.

Grunge and Punk

Grunge style fashion is the clothing, accessories and hairstyles of the grunge music genre and subculture, which emerged in mid-1980s Seattle and reached wide popularity by the early 1990s. Embraced by Generation X as an anti-fashion, it contrasts with the flashy excessiveness of the 1980s: grunge fashion is characterized by durable and timeless thrift-store clothing, often worn in a loose, androgynous manner to de-emphasize the silhouette. The style was popularized by music artists such as Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love and Pearl Jam — flannel, worn denim and boots bought to last, assembled to look unassembled.

Punk fashion is the clothing, hairstyles, cosmetics, jewellery and body modifications of the punk subculture, and it varies widely — from Vivienne Westwood designs to styles modeled on bands like The Exploited to the dressed-down look of North American hardcore. The distinct social dress of other subcultures and art movements, including glam rock, skinheads, rude boys, greasers and mods, has influenced punk fashion, and punk has influenced those styles and popular culture in return. Many punks use clothing as a way of making a statement — which is punk's permanent contribution to young men's dressing: the outfit as argument.

Gothic Fashion

Gothic fashion is a clothing style marked by conspicuously dark, mysterious, antiquated and homogenous features, worn by members of the Goth subculture. A dark, sometimes morbid fashion and style of dress, typical gothic fashion includes black clothes worn with dark styling — both male and female goths can wear dark eyeliner and dark fingernail polish, most especially black.

Styles are often borrowed from punk fashion and from the Victorians and Elizabethans, which gives gothic menswear its distinctive mix: black tailoring, antique silhouettes and romantic detail inside an otherwise modern wardrobe. Gothic fashion is sometimes confused with heavy metal fashion and emo fashion; the distinction is the antiquarian streak — goth looks backward to earlier centuries where metal looks to the stage and emo to the diary.

How to Wear Youth Style Well

The practical lesson of the movements above is that young men's fashion rewards commitment to one clear idea. Hip hop's oversized fit, grunge's thrifted layers, punk's statement pieces and goth's all-black antiquarianism all work because each is a complete point of view — the failures happen when three movements are worn at once, or when a trend is copied without the generation's context that made it read as authentic.

For young men themselves, the buying rules are friendly: experiment while experimentation is cheap, thrift what the movements themselves thrifted, and build around durable basics — good denim, plain tees, boots and sneakers — that survive the trend cycle. For everyone else, this guide's standing advice holds: borrow the energy if you like, dress inside your own bracket, and find the latest styles at the retailers in our store directory, online or at the mall, where teen and young men's clothing offers more trendy options than any other department in menswear.