Men are not chic

Source: men are not chic, ash callaghan, 20:43, uploaded 2025-12-01, playlist index 131.

Ash Callaghan opens with a suspicion that the word “chic” makes men uneasy. In ordinary use it carries a feminine charge, whilst men tend to use “niche” for the things they find interesting or distinctive. The distinction gives her a way to talk about taste, gender, trend cycles, and the difference between a lived style and an outfit assembled from internet instructions.

Niche, chic, and the dictionary

Callaghan begins with the TikTok trend in which women list the niche things they find chic. She wants to join in with a list of her own, although she expects some viewers to find the examples ordinary or strange. Her first example is short nails. In an earlier video she gathered her own data and tested whether natural nails could count as niche. She describes a sample of 3,299 men and women, with 65 percent of the sample having natural nails. Using ten percent as the upper limit for a niche interest, she reports a z-score of 107.84 and a p-value close to zero. Her conclusion is that natural nails are common enough to fail the quantitative definition of niche.

The statistical joke leads into the word she really wants to discuss. Callaghan presents the dictionary definition of niche as an adjective describing products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialised part of the population. She then gives chic its dictionary definition: elegantly and stylishly fashionable. The example sentence uses a woman to explain elegance, and the entry for “elegant” supplies another sentence about a woman in black. When Callaghan looks up “stylishly” and “fashionably”, the definitions send her back to one another. The dictionary becomes a small closed loop, with gender built into the example that is meant to explain the word.

She brings in the related terms “quiet luxury”, “old money”, and “stealth wealth”, which she treats as versions of the same current aesthetic. Wikipedia describes quiet luxury as a lifestyle marked by understated elegance. In Callaghan’s account, the look belongs to people who are rich enough to leave their wealth unstated. That is the conventional meaning she wants to loosen.

TikTok chic and the problem of sameness

The women in the TikTok trend use chic with a different emphasis. Callaghan shows a large bag that is overfilled to the point of mess, then distressed denim that looks worn through ordinary life rather than manufactured with a few decorative tears. These things carry the visual language of use. They also circulate as trend signals because TikTok users keep referring to the same objects during a particular period.

She compares the current examples with her earlier short-nail trend. Short, plain nails had become the shared reference then. A few months later, messy bags and jeans with holes had taken their place. The word chic therefore seems to mean “trendy” in this setting. Callaghan finds that definition dull because it leads towards a common uniform. The quiet-luxury definition has its own problem. It turns a gendered version of old-money dressing into a general standard of elegance, which leaves little room for the eccentric detail that made the TikTok list interesting in the first place.

This gives the video its working invitation. Men can use the word chic, although Callaghan would prefer them to take pleasure in being unchic. The rest of the video builds that position through examples rather than a settled definition.

Skin, teeth, and scent

The first unchic choice is skin as an accessory. Callaghan thinks recent fashion has accumulated too much jewellery, too many belts, backwards necklaces, and other objects that insist on being noticed. She reaches back to the Marilyn Monroe era and the backless dress, where an exposed strip of the body becomes the ornament. Her joke is that the butt crack is the jewellery. The point is partly comic and partly aesthetic. The body can carry the visual interest of a garment without an added object competing for attention.

She applies the same thought to hands. A signet ring can interrupt the shape of a hand that already has its own beauty. Intentionally leaving off an accessory becomes a choice in its own right. Callaghan’s recommendation to men is plain: if the human form is doing enough, let it do the work.

Her next example comes from Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”. Crooked teeth, a monobrow, and other unusual features can give a face its character. She sets these against the uniform result of veneers, with every tooth made the same bright white. Callaghan speaks from her own position. Her teeth are neither straight nor glowing white, and she lives at a time when cosmetic changes are available to her. She chooses to leave them alone because the option to change a feature does not create a duty to change it.

Perfume extends the argument from visible accessories to scent. A person can be interesting without wearing an obscure fragrance, and in a world where nearly everyone is perfumed, clean and neutral may be the more unusual choice. Callaghan likes white florals on herself, yet she also values each person having a recognisable scent that does not depend on expensive aftershave or a strong perfume. She prefers someone who smells clean to someone whose fragrance sits over poor hygiene. The source makes the point through a deliberately unpleasant joke about the smell of bodily fluids, while admitting that Callaghan has not tested the combination herself.

Texture, layering, and the single garment

Callaghan then moves from the body to the material of clothes. Texture can give an outfit its interest without bright colour or several layers. Wool and cashmere look different from polyester, and they also feel different against the fingers and the body. Their weight changes how a garment moves while a person walks and how it falls when worn. For Callaghan, those details offer a better basis for judging quality than a pile of visible styling decisions.

She notices that luxury marketing tends towards black, white, silver, grey, and navy, whilst value products use warmer reds and yellows. She sees a similar colour division in food marketing, where the cheaper item is often warm-toned and the expensive version is presented as cool and restrained. Fashion and food follow one another closely because what people eat affects how they look, she says. She also admits that she needs to study colour theory before making a dedicated video, since she does not want to spread claims she has not checked. The cool-luxury and warm-value observation remains her own reading of marketing, without evidence named in the video.

The main point returns to clothing. A person can make an outfit interesting through texture and through the quality of individual pieces. Callaghan dislikes layering several garments and accessories when each item becomes too small to notice. She buttons jackets, hoodies, sweatshirts, and jumpers because she wants the outer piece to stand on its own. Attention has a limited capacity. Dividing it between many small details makes the whole outfit feel visually and psychologically messy.

“Dress for yourself” and the performed self

Callaghan’s last item is the familiar instruction to dress for yourself. She finds the phrase tired, then begins to doubt her own criticism. Fashion videos once focused on products that a creator liked, in the manner of a monthly favourites video. They have moved towards telling viewers who they should be. That shift can become troubling when a person does not know who they are or does not yet like the person they see. Following a trend can offer social belonging or a temporary thing to practise whilst a sense of self develops. A command to be authentic can ignore that people often find themselves through imitation.

Workwear gives Callaghan a more concrete example. A man arriving at a function in his work clothes can be attractive because the clothes show that he has a skill and cares about something. She points to tradespeople on a lunch break, with tool belts and paint on their trousers. The clothing has a history in the person’s life, so the competence remains visible in the outfit.

The same pieces look different when someone buys them as a costume. A new Carhartt jacket and pristine cargo trousers do not carry the evidence of work. Callaghan calls this the performative male and extends the point to other aesthetics. Someone who owns a yacht and a summer house may have the old-money appearance as a consequence of an actual life. A person who buys the same signals as a costume can look absurd because the clothing claims a history that the wearer does not possess.

Callaghan then turns the criticism on the word authenticity. Fashion has begun to sell authenticity as another trend and another aesthetic. The word still has a more useful meaning when it describes a person whose clothes grow from their life, interests, and abilities. That kind of authenticity remains attractive because it is present in the person rather than applied as a look.

The conclusion keeps the joke in place. Men are not chic, and Callaghan sees little reason to want the label. Her examples leave the reader with a looser standard for unchic style: an uncovered body can carry an outfit, a crooked tooth can keep a face recognisable, texture can replace decoration, and workwear can show the life that produced it. The source treats these as aesthetic preferences and comic observations, with its strongest claim reserved for the gap between a person living through a style and a person performing one.

Limits

This is a personal fashion essay built from Callaghan’s taste, selected visual examples, dictionary entries, Wikipedia’s description of quiet luxury, and her own earlier nail calculation. The captions provide no links to the dictionaries, Wikipedia page, marketing examples, colour research, or data behind the reported test. The statistical result therefore remains a claim about an earlier video rather than a verifiable analysis here. The cool-toned luxury and warm-toned value distinction, the history of the backless dress, and the claims about perfume and hygiene also remain Callaghan’s observations. The note preserves the argument as a record of her distinctions between decoration, material, trend, and lived experience rather than treating those judgements as a general theory of fashion.