NOW AVAILABLE: Quiet is a luxury men cannot afford

ED'S NOTE:

In the build-up to the June issue, the word “quiet” has been on my fashion radar. One couldn’t be in my seat and not notice that the buzzy trend for 2023 has been “quiet luxury” — all soft fabrics, intricate tailoring, and muted hues, the antithesis of a turbo-charged Supreme collaboration. For an example of this sartorial restraint, you need look no further than our fashion story, with Armani and Alexander McQueen sitting fabulously — and quietly, of course — next to Black Coffee and Wanda Lephoto.

In recent months, a barrage of “quiet luxury” think pieces has clogged my feed, almost as often as missives about its most visible flag bearer, the recently concluded hit series Succession, where the only thing that’s quiet is the clothes.

In Joburg, we have been observing and weighing in. As a follow-up to an online piece at the dawn of the hype around the stealthy way the most discerning of the privileged classes signal their wealth through their apparel, Sandiso Ngubane revisits the trend, the debates it has elicited, and what it could possibly mean for us.

In thinking — as I often do, sometimes rather obsessively — about men’s role in society, the word quiet emerges once again, in a more sinister, all too familiar way, if you’ll excuse the deviation into more earnest territory. As Alexander Parker observes in his column, whenever you confront a societal problem, a man is never too far away.

As our kind consistently ups the ante on inflicting maximum damage on women, children, the planet, and ourselves, the din of quietness rings louder — about as loudly as our insipid first citizen whenever we are in crisis, be its origins health, sanitation, corruption, energy, infrastructure or a fundamental hatred of women. It frightens me that there is no office in our country more representative of ineffectiveness and benign power than our highest office; one that too often fails at managing vested interests, message and tonality, even as it has some competent communicators in its orbit. Most importantly, it is poor at leading action.

We, as I summon my inner Justice Malala, are on our own, which effectively means the most vulnerable among us have no credible view of a less precarious reality. And yet, we remain quiet, just like we have always been, especially as it pertains to our proclivity to violence. When challenged about our inaction, at our worst we men bark ferociously and attack rabidly. When the mood allows, we tap into what we have learned about virtue signalling: tweet appropriately, regurgitate some thoughtless phrases about what “real men” don’t do, and just as quickly alight from our high horse to “hydrate and mind our own business”.

Quiet is a luxury we have indulged in for far too long. Our clothes — from the loudest monogrammed golfer-and-sneaker combo at the infamous Konka club to the subtlest Zegna getup adorning Kieran Culkin’s character Roman Roy on Succession – function variously as armour, uniform and, in some instances, dog whistle. What our clothes cannot do, no matter their decibels, is cleanse us of our most shameful impulses, in Soweto or on the Upper East Side.

So, if you are reading this and identify as a man, your clothes can be as quiet as you like, but when it’s time to speak up — and that time is now — I’m going to need you to roar like Logan Roy.

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