A little after 9:30 A.M. on a crisp late November day, a potential customer tried to enter designer Todd Snyder’s flagship store, located a camel-coated walk across 26th Street from Madison Square Park. Snyder watched as the guy rattled the doors. The store would open, as it does Monday through Saturday, at 10 A.M. (11 on Sundays.) The guy would have to come back.

This stuck in Snyder’s craw.

“Four a day,” he says. That’s the number of guys who don’t buy Champion-collab sweats or Tricker’s-collab shoes or Snyder-brand T-shirts with the little button on the pocket because they’re too early—too eager—to enter. Still, he’s tickled. “I just love that. I just sit here all the time and just watch.”

Snyder explains all this to me as we sit in a scaled-down branch of El Rey, the hipster-beloved downtown coffee shop, that happens to be located inside his store. Snyder looks not unlike an off-duty superhero transported from the 1950s—maybe six-two, sturdy and strong-jawed. He acts like one, too. He’s Midwestern polite and shockingly even-keeled, not just for a fashion designer, sure, but for any kind of human alive in 2018.

This morning, Snyder sits with his back to the wall and observes, placidly noting whether everything is in its Snyder-approved place: the new barber for the in-house barbershop (needs keys), the preparation of the eggs on the cafe's breakfast sandwiches (“How come sometimes it’s scrambled?”). The next time we meet, also at the store, he'll be derailed within seconds by the height of a sale sign occupying the main window. He’d like for it to be raised ten inches, he tells an employee, and then greets me with a bear-paw handshake. The store is his magnum opus. It won’t ever be perfect, or finished (if you want, you can buy the rugs; two people have), but that won’t stop Snyder from trying to make it so. Because it’s here that the Todd Snyder project is most painstakingly articulated. The store is a proposition: This is everything a man needs.

Snyder adjusting a look for his Fall/Winter 2018 runway show

These days, the menswear labels that show on European runways, flood department stores, and blow up Instagram accounts prize novelty, artful ugliness, and the almighty logo. In comparison, Snyder might scan as safe, or just not interested in playing the same game. But as granddad sneakers and all-embroidery-everything rise, peak, and fall out of favor, he’ll be here, tucked away just north of Madison Square Park, selling khakis and Alden shoes and bodywash to guys who trust him to do what they themselves can’t: make them look and feel like better versions of themselves.

You’ve seen that better version because he’s now everywhere. He’s your frat brother who lived in cargo shorts, and then showed up to your wedding in a suit with a shockingly slim lapel. He’s your actual brother, who arrived at Thanksgiving wearing an uncharacteristically dapper topcoat, a pair of tailored sweatpants from a heritage sportswear company, and a pair of reissued sneakers from a different heritage sportswear company. He’s your coworker, whose watch—vaguely military face, colorful fabric band—earned him compliments after the marketing meeting. Maybe he’s you, who finally pulled the trigger on a turtleneck. (It looks great, by the way. You’re totally pulling it off.)

This is the Great Every-Guy Makeover, and it's happening for many reasons. Perhaps the most significant one: it's happening because Todd Snyder knows exactly what guys are willing to wear to look good.

Snyder himself is Exhibit A. He wears mostly his own clothes—a Todd Snyder camel topcoat with Ralph Lauren jeans, or Todd Snyder black chinos and sneakers that Snyder designed in collaboration with New Balance—to each of our meetings. These are his staples, best characterized by their deep respect for American manufacturing, but also the nonzero chance that wearing them might get you mistaken for a Sporty European or a Reformed Sneakerhead or a Successful Turtleneck Wearer. The Todd Snyder aesthetic isn’t overtly challenging, but I wouldn’t call it boring, either. It’s clothing from an imaginary Menswear’s Greatest Hits catalog, a brand that’s just as happy to educate a curious guy on the slim sweatpant revolution as it is to sell four-figure outerwear to that guy three years from now. It’s clothing that marks Steve McQueen as the high point of American style, which is no longer the hip thing to do but is also really hard to argue with.