Fashion is not cool anymore

Source: Fashion is not cool anymore, ash callaghan, 9:48, uploaded 2025-08-03, Watch Later position 394.

Ash Callaghan opens with an anti-fashion paradox. “Fashionable” should describe adherence to current popular trends, yet the current trend seems to be avoiding the appearance of trendiness. Her name for the quality that makes an outfit cool is “sauce”, which she defines in this video as authenticity. The joke then moves from clothes to the internet’s demand that every interest look sincere, self-aware, and personally earned.

An anti-fashion paradigm

Callaghan uses the recent reaction to Benson Boone as an example. People compared Boone with Freddie Mercury and Harry Styles, then decided that he was failing to reproduce what made those men convincing. Her imagined test is whether Boone looks comfortable enough in his sexuality to kiss another man. She presents that judgement as the source of the discomfort: the audience reads the performance as an imitation because it does not believe the person inside it has lived the role. The claim concerns the internet’s reading of Boone, rather than evidence about his sexuality.

That reaction leads into the TikTok label “performative man”. Callaghan introduces the figure through a short sequence of sketches. He reads feminist books, drinks matcha, wears baggy jeans and crop tops, and listens to Clairo through wired headphones. He looks for Angela Davis and Susan B. Anthony in a bookshop, asks a woman to hold his matcha whilst he photographs her with a disposable camera, and turns small objects such as a keychain into proof of a carefully assembled personality. The performance depends on a straight man selecting interests that social media codes as feminine and using them to appear attractive to women.

Fashion is often described as self-expression, boundary-pushing, and creativity. Callaghan asks who the performative man’s strut is for, then answers that he is dressing for women because he wants women to like him. Reading becomes the clearest example. Women may like reading, she says, although that does not make a man attractive simply because he has learnt that reading is an attractive hobby. The imagined book is a 1987 novel by a Japanese author named Murakami, described as a nostalgic story of loss according to Wikipedia. The joke turns on the gap between owning the right cultural signal and having any reason to care about it.

The mockery becomes recursive. The men making fun of performative men still wear the same baggy clothes, read the same kind of books, drink matcha, and listen to Clairo. They try to place themselves above the trend through self-awareness. Callaghan’s point is that recognising a performance does not remove it. It adds another performance whose purpose is to create distance from the first one.

Contentification

She draws the cycle as a series of increasingly self-conscious trends. The first man wears baggy jeans and a crop top, drinks matcha, and reads. The next man wears the same clothes whilst mocking Clairo listeners. Another carries a Labubu or turns a keychain into part of the joke. Each version claims to have seen through the previous one, yet each version still gives the audience a recognisable costume.

Callaghan places herself inside the same machine. She calls the channel a social experiment and points to her own changes of position. First she appears in baggy jeans and participates in the social-media dance around them. A few months later she says that baggy jeans are stupid. She then comments on people who say that baggy-jean wearers are stupid. Her self-awareness gives her one more layer of performance, although it does not let her leave the cycle.

The cycle works because social media is performance. A post has to hold attention, since an uninteresting post earns no audience and therefore no money. Callaghan extends this logic to news, science, and politics. She thinks the internet makes it harder to distinguish reporting and research from fearmongering, conspiracy theories, and fascism because each subject has been turned into content that competes for attention. A fifteen-minute Jubilee video can feel more interesting than eight hours in the House of Commons, which gives the shorter performance an advantage over the slower institution.

She then cuts to a mock political exchange. One voice insists that the discussion is only content, whilst another says that a fascist can be called a fascist. A second argument moves through assumptions, gravity, and the limits of science before ending in the ordinary defence that a judgement is “my opinion”. Another voice tells someone that he need not like Brooks, sleep with him, or go on holiday with him. The fragments sound like arguments because the internet presents disagreement as a sequence of compelling positions, even when the exchange supplies little context or evidence.

Callaghan calls her own work a non-political educational podcast, then admits that the label comes from the same problem. Once extreme views receive a platform because they are entertaining, people begin to treat visibility as evidence that every political view deserves equal weight. Fashion follows the same pattern. Calling out the performative man feels like a gotcha delivered by people who already understand the performance, so the call-out becomes another layer of the same content.

The poor men hypothesis

The label keeps changing. Callaghan says the same behaviour has moved through names such as “authenticity police”, “Benson Boone cringe”, and “performative man”. She calls herself the next performative man and predicts that someone, probably herself, will soon make a video criticising her for criticising performative men. The cycle can keep adding layers because every layer can become a new trend.

Her final hypothesis concerns gender. She has seen men receive this backlash whilst the phrase “performative woman” has not become a comparable TikTok category. She thinks the difference may come from the narrower range of styles that men are allowed to perform. Women can move through aesthetics such as brat, Y2K, indie sleaze, and clean girl. Men have “fashion bro”, which reduces to baggy jeans and a crop top. Even a Brat Man or Y2K Man ends up in the same outfit, so the performance has fewer visible forms.

That is why fashionable men have become uncool in Callaghan’s account. Fashion works when the wearer appears to have arrived at the clothes through a life, an interest, or a preference that exists before the trend. A man who tries to look fashionable displays the effort that the current style asks him to hide. Callaghan ends by accepting the weakness in her own complaint: people may listen to Clairo because they like Clairo, and performative reading remains better than being unable to read. The final line returns to the business behind the whole cycle. Fashion is no longer cool because everything has become a business decision.

Limits

This is a satirical personal essay, so its account of authenticity, gendered taste, and social-media performance remains Callaghan’s framing. The video supplies no data for the claim that men’s fashionable options are narrower, the claim that women avoid the same backlash, or the wider argument about contentification. The Benson Boone example turns an internet reaction into a test of sincerity and says nothing reliable about Boone’s sexuality. The political cutaways work as staged examples of online argument rather than evidence about the people or views they resemble.

Further reading / references

• Wikipedia, which Callaghan cites for the description of a 1987 novel by a Japanese author named Murakami. The video does not identify the novel or provide the article URL.