Saturday, July 18, 2026

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By T.M. Brown

Welcome to Big Style, a portal to a world where clothing meets culture. This week, CNN Senior Features Reporter T.M. Brown has noticed that straight guys like himself are embracing sexier sartorial choices. Have thoughts, questions or feedback? Reach us here: bigstyle@newsletters.cnn.com

Mentioned in this issue: lace shirts, heteropessimism, Prince’s smoky eyeliner, JFK Jr.’s bike shorts, metrosexuals (remember those?), that D’Angelo video, the very nature of desire, and more.

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ARE STRAIGHT MEN GETTING... SEXIER?

Bad Bunny is one of the clearest examples of how the sartorial lines between masculinity and sensuality have become closely intertwined. (Getty Images)

Three weeks ago, when it was hot basically everywhere in the Western Hemisphere, I started noticing the signs emerging among my straight male friends. Shorts had crept up legs, like blinds being slowly raised, to reveal delicate thigh tattoos. They wore mesh and open weave shirts that have become increasingly common sights at acclaimed designers like Bode, downtown fashion darlings like Aimé Leon Dore and international mega-retailers like Zara. The number of buttons they’d deign to button sank like a plumb line towards the navel. Even I wasn’t immune: a black lace shirt from the Japanese brand Needles has become one of the favorite things I own.

Straight men seem to be basking in their sensuality these days. Some of that is thanks to a transformation in how they consider and discuss clothing and, more broadly, appearance. For a long time, straight guys who cared “too much” about what they looked like — remember “metrosexual?” — were often labeled gay (as if that were a bad thing). Now fabrics and fits are discussed over beer and shot deals in dive bars. Caring about how you look invites a certain level of self-consciousness, and in that awareness comes an understanding of how you are perceived and desired by potential partners.

This is, apparently, the first time guys are hearing about this. Traditionally, straight men have thought about sex and sexiness as a matter of exhibiting desire — rather than thinking about what it means to be desired. The imbalance of those impulses has created, let’s say, some problems. Men largely do not understand what women want, and women in turn have had it up to here. “Men? Maybe Not,” read one New York Times headline in 2024 about a rising tide of “heteropessimism.” Late last year, a Vogue writer asked the blithely provocative question upfront: “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?”

The late singer D'Angelo was admired as much for his body as for his sensual R&B anthems. (Paul Natkin/Getty Images)

Harry Styles, a Bode model, and the one and only Prince showcasing different variations of sexy styling. (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images; NOWFASHION/Shutterstock; Ross Marino/Icon and Image/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Slowly, though, men seem to be coming around to the idea that it’s as appealing to be wanted as it is to want — and they are reflecting this in how they choose to present themselves to the world. “Gay or straight, every guy is trying to get laid,” the menswear legend and noted gay man Nick Wooster told me when I put the question of a sexy straight awakening to him. He said that menswear being “out of the closet” more securely — compared to the diet-homophobia of the metrosexual era — has given straight guys license to care about their clothing and appearance without judgement. “It’s not scary to talk about clothes now,” he said.

The permission to be self-conscious feels like a departure from how men were sexualized in the past. Heartthrobs like James Dean and Robert Redford were always desired by women, but they were also rammed through the narrowest of gender filters. To be a sexually appealing guy was strictly limited to the rugged and extremely manly. “It’s become looser. Being sexy isn’t strictly masculine or feminine for straight guys now,” Wooster said.

In some ways, modern guys are discovering what artists like Prince knew all along. He played with femininity through smoky eyeliner and velvet suits paired with ruffled collared shirts. It didn’t stop women from wanting him to say the least, but in many ways his clothing and affect were meant to keep sexuality in a specifically feminine vernacular where it could be understood and digested. The same could be said of someone like Harry Styles, whose norm-challenging sartorial choices haven't impeded his sex symbol status among many heterosexual women.

Rock stars are perhaps the most legible form of the sexy straight man we have, but they have also long been desired for their ability to play with gender norms. The huge exception here is Black artists like Usher and the late D’Angelo, who have, like many Black men before them, been sexualized by audiences for a perceived hypermasculinity. D’Angelo’s video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” — ironically, an homage to Prince — turned the artist’s chiseled body into his best-known feature. After the video, fans would scream at him to strip down at concerts. The shift in how audiences viewed him was one reason D’Angelo retreated from public life for a decade and struggled both personally and creatively. In 2012, he told GQ about his conflicted feelings during the "Voodoo” tour. “One time I got mad when a female threw money at me onstage, and that made me feel fucked-up, and I threw the money back at her. I was like, 'I'm not a stripper.'”

Idris Elba is so sexy, the public keeps nominating him to become the next James Bond. He doesn't want it! (Kate Green/Getty Images)

Dwyane Wade has embraced pastel colorways and skin-bearing ensembles in recent years. (Presley Ann/Getty Images)

If you browse social media, though, straight guys seem to be inviting that objectification to the delight of women who are expressing their desire in turn. The return of JFK Jr. to public consciousness thanks to “Love Story” had women thirsting over men in skimpy tank tops and bike shorts. Ryan Hartsig, an influencer in Jacksonville, Florida, often posts pictures of himself getting ready for jogs in tiny shorts that show off the tattoos that run down both his legs. The comment sections on his videos are often made up mostly of women and they are feral. “The way I would bark at you from my car,” reads one illustrative love note. Some of this renaissance, then, is also thanks to heterosexual women vocalizing their desire in ways that might be coded as more masculine and subvert social norms about sex and desire. Desire takes two people, after all. (More if you’re lucky.) Exhausted from the indignities and disappointments of gendered expectations in love and dating, it’s no surprise that straight women might also be trying something different. Telling guys they can wear slutty little glasses or calling them run-through is perhaps an attempt at a sexual balancing out, and lets guys relish rather than wallow in their physicality.

Personally, I think all of this is a good thing. The unfinished understanding of what love and sex look like can lead to disastrous places. Last week, the Cornell philosophy professor Kate Manne published an essay arguing that antisocial developments like looksmaxxing have emerged from the cultural cul-de-sac of the manosphere because the male gaze had turned back on its source like Medusa staring into a mirror. “A generation ago, the typical straight man projected indifference about his appearance,” she writes. “Now a straight man’s appearance seems to be an increasingly important expression of his masculinity,” she continues. “I suggest the male gaze, long trained on women, is turning on straight men too.” To the guys currently stuck in that gaze-y feedback loop, I suggest an alternative: understand what it is to be wanted by someone who wants you back, even if that means putting on a lacework shirt and showing a little leg.

I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT SUITS

One of the greatest men to ever sport a suit — Al Pacino in 1975's “Dog Day Afternoon.” (Muky/Warner Bros/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Years ago, when I was riding the Tokyo subway on a sweltering August morning, I stood across from an older man in an immaculately tailored suit made from summer tweed. It must have been 90 degrees and humid, and the man stood stoic and sweaty, on his way to work or somewhere more interesting. He looked wonderful.

I think about him some mornings on my way to work, when it seems like those wearing suits would rather be wearing anything else. I see interns in scratchy wool-blends pulling at their cuffs and dads vacuum-sealed into uneven glen plaids. To wear tailoring in America is a boring, spirit-sapping chore; there’s a reason “suit” is a withering insult. But all of these bad suits have made me want to wear good suits in different weaves and fabrics and weights. Here are four suit things I’m thinking about:

More men should have a good and honest relationship with a tailor. My tailor Arthur Arbit has worked magic for years — and has also flat-out told me that a suit I purchased on eBay would never fit me the right way, so I would be better off not having him do any alterations. Sometimes people need tough love with their clothing!
The average guy needs to do away with the idea that suits have an inherent formality to them. The Chiltern Street menswear corridor in London is a living lesson in how suits can be dressed up or down.
Speaking of London — and Europe more generally — I find myself wondering why there are so many more good mid-tier tailoring outfits across the pond than there are in New York. England (Natalino and Anglo-Italian), Poland (Poszetka) and Sweden (Casatlantic and Grand Lè Mar) are all making great suits at sub-luxury price points. America yearns for the same!
Great suit movies I’ve seen recently in no particular order: The Firm, Dog Day Afternoon, The Day of the Jackal, Margin Call (only Jeremy Irons), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

T.M Brown, CNN Senior Features Reporter

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