Let it be writ in the history books: throughout the 2020s, the most stylish men wore wide-leg trousers. Swinging away from the skinny trend that conspired to cut off our collective blood supply from the late 2000s to the mid 2010s (thank you Hedi Slimane), trouser silhouettes have been getting progressively wider over the past decade. They’ve now reached a point where they are the dominant silhouette of the moment. Running the gamut from simple straight-leg fits to ones that are loose and all-out baggy, the best trousers nowadays have plenty in common with the Oxford bags that university students wore in the early 20th century. The menswear runways, too, are filled with brands offering their own takes: Dries Van Noten and Grace Wales Bonner are two designers who have helped pioneer the trend, creating richly draped trousers that feel elegant, luxurious and breezy – as comfortable and easy to pull on as a pair of sweatpants, but eminently more sophisticated.

In 2020, millions of workers moved their jobs from cubicles to bedrooms, creating a work-from-home economy coordinated through Slack, Zoom and Google Docs. Five years on, that experiment looks to be winding down. In April, Google informed some remote staff that they would have to return to work or face termination. Meta and Apple now require at least three days in the office, while JPMorgan, Amazon and The Washington Post are phasing out remote work altogether. For workers, the shift raises a familiar but tricky question: how to dress for the office. It’s not just that some have grown accustomed to pyjamas and sweatpants – although those are comfy – but office dress codes are inherently confusing. When Goldman Sachs sent a memo to some 36,000 employees announcing they no longer needed to wear a coat and tie, the firm didn’t say what should take its place. Management merely advised staff to “dress in a manner that accords with the company’s and clients’ expectations” and to “exercise good judgment.” In other words: you figure it out. This is why questions about how to dress for work are rarely settled. Hard-written rules have been slowly replaced by softly coded norms, which has caused endless confusion. No formula works for everyone since so much can vary depending on the industry, company, region and even job position. Still, if you’re left with no other direction, there are some guidelines on how to return to your workplace in style.

September has arrived, and with it autumn… maybe, or at least the gnawing sense that summer is fading away. That week in Milos or Tinos or was it Paros? It feels like a while ago now. It’s now time to start thinking about our autumnal wardrobe rotation. Though we loathe to describe anything as transitional, September poses a challenge when it comes to getting dressed – the sort of month that can swing from glory to gloom, often in the same day. More than anything else, it can be especially hard to know what shoes to wear.

No one could have predicted that the white-hot centre of American fashion for the past decade would be New York City's most unassuming borough. Queens never became a commodified cultural export like Brooklyn did, nor did it ever compete with the cosmopolitanism of Manhattan or give birth to a dominant culture like the Bronx did with hip-hop. (Staten Island's pastoral otherness is its own thing.) But maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that a brand like Aimé Leon Dore could emerge from a Queens apartment and become one of the world's most influential brands. It is the World’s Borough, after all, home to more than two million people in the city of 800 languages[DDE1] , where an unmistakable hum of energy runs from Jamaica to Woodside, the Rockaways to College Point. And Queens’ own Teddy Santis knew there was a power in that patchwork. He turned the borough’s modest gravity into the powerfully unaffected cool of ALD. When Santis launched the brand in 2014, he was betting that there was room in menswear for something that walked up to the timeline of American heritage brands and looked both ways. These were clothes that felt like they’d been pulled from your cool uncle’s closet but cut to have modern shapes and drapes.

Let it be writ in the history books: throughout the 2020s, the most stylish men wore wide-leg trousers. Swinging away from the skinny trend that conspired to cut off our collective blood supply from the late 2000s to the mid 2010s (thank you Hedi Slimane), trouser silhouettes have been getting progressively wider over the past decade. They’ve now reached a point where they are the dominant silhouette of the moment. Running the gamut from simple straight-leg fits to ones that are loose and all-out baggy, the best trousers nowadays have plenty in common with the Oxford bags that university students wore in the early 20th century. The menswear runways, too, are filled with brands offering their own takes: Dries Van Noten and Grace Wales Bonner are two designers who have helped pioneer the trend, creating richly draped trousers that feel elegant, luxurious and breezy – as comfortable and easy to pull on as a pair of sweatpants, but eminently more sophisticated.

In 2020, millions of workers moved their jobs from cubicles to bedrooms, creating a work-from-home economy coordinated through Slack, Zoom and Google Docs. Five years on, that experiment looks to be winding down. In April, Google informed some remote staff that they would have to return to work or face termination. Meta and Apple now require at least three days in the office, while JPMorgan, Amazon and The Washington Post are phasing out remote work altogether. For workers, the shift raises a familiar but tricky question: how to dress for the office. It’s not just that some have grown accustomed to pyjamas and sweatpants – although those are comfy – but office dress codes are inherently confusing. When Goldman Sachs sent a memo to some 36,000 employees announcing they no longer needed to wear a coat and tie, the firm didn’t say what should take its place. Management merely advised staff to “dress in a manner that accords with the company’s and clients’ expectations” and to “exercise good judgment.” In other words: you figure it out. This is why questions about how to dress for work are rarely settled. Hard-written rules have been slowly replaced by softly coded norms, which has caused endless confusion. No formula works for everyone since so much can vary depending on the industry, company, region and even job position. Still, if you’re left with no other direction, there are some guidelines on how to return to your workplace in style.