A decade into the Internet-fuelled fashion movement that has more or less reshaped the way men dress, have we hit peak menswear? Photograph by Chelsea Lauren / Getty

Earlier this fall, Antonio Banderas, a.k.a. Zorro, began taking classes in menswear design at Central Saint Martins, the renowned London fashion school. In an interview with the school’s student-run Web site and magazine, Banderas explained that he wanted to start his own menswear line; his particular ambition was to bring back the cape. Capes for men, he said, have “incredible possibilities”:

There are all these varieties of capes. For example, in the time of Charles the Third in Spain, capes were an instrument to kill—and to cover yourself. People used to do this [makes Zorro move] and nobody would know who you were. So they used to cut the capes and do these short capes, because it was forbidden by the law to wear long capes at night.… In Spain there are still places where there are clubs of people who love to wear capes. The shape has almost the same shape as the capote for bullfighting, in beautiful pink silk, with yellow or blue in the back.

“For me, it’s actually easier than a coat,” he concluded. “You walk into a place and you just BOOM! throw it off.”

How plausible is it that, a few years from now, men on the streets of New York will be wearing capes designed by Antonio Banderas? The answer is “very”; it’s easy to name the combination of factors—heritage marketing, “Game of Thrones,” Kanye—that could make it happen. It takes only a little imagination to propose that, during the Great Cape Revival of 2019, capotes will be worn with sneakers and tights as a way of giving the fading “athleisure” trend (hoodies, T-shirts, sweatpants) a little seventeenth-century swagger. This won’t seem strange; instead, it will be an evolutionary development from the Great Poncho Revival of 2016.

These days, although ordinary men still dress in ordinary ways, “menswear”—the Internet-centric, metropolitan, yuppie style—keeps getting riskier. Hardcore menswear enthusiasts have found themselves dressing in costume-like clothes; although they look great in their tweedy sport coats and pocket squares, asymmetrical hoodies and slim-cut jogging pants, and military jackets layered over other, lighter military jackets, they also look like they’re in town for a menswear-themed Comic-Con. Faced with these examples, I’ve found myself taking stock of the movement that has, for the past decade, more or less covertly reshaped the way men dress. Have we reached peak menswear?

If one had to pick the date on or about which men’s clothing changed, October, 2010, could be a sensible choice. That’s when The Hairpin published an article, by Mary H. K. Choi, called “All Dudes Learned How to Dress and It Sucks.” “There must have been some clandestine colloquium workshop situation where all the dudes in all the land shucked to skivvies and got sized for their perfect pair of Uniqlo jeans and nobody said ‘no homo,’ not even one time,” Choi wrote. The upside of this change was that, all of a sudden, men on the subway looked “SO GODDAMN GOOD”; the downside was that it was now impossible to guess anything about a man from his clothes. “I have ZERO idea what dude is who right now,” Choi concluded.

There wasn’t, unfortunately, a clandestine colloquium, but there was “menswear,” a conversation that began online, in the early aughts, largely on Internet forums devoted to men’s fashion. Each forum catered to a slightly different kind of man. On Ask Andy About Clothes, old prepsters—“trads”—talked about sack suits; on Superfuture, kids who wanted to look like Tetsuo, from “Akira,” compared the fades on their Japanese denim. Users on Styleforum obsessed over heritage and craft, discussing labels like Incotex, Brioni, Filson, and Schott, while StyleZeitgeist was more avant-garde, with an emphasis on Rick Owens.

In those heady days, debates raged over fundamental questions: whether black suits are ever appropriate at non-funeral events (they’re not), whether stocky guys can pull off the “goth ninja” look (undecided), and whether jeans should “stack” at the hem or get cuffed (I prefer stacks). All of the “fora” had online marketplaces where men from around the world bought and sold clothes, and, slowly, a consensus emerged about the “grail” items each kind of man must own: Alden cordovan wingtips to go with your multipocked Engineered Garments “Bedford” blazer; flannel shirts from the Japanese brand Flat Head to wear with your Iron Heart or Sugar Cane denim; ties from Drake’s, sport coats from Isaia; a Rick Owens “Exploder” jacket paired with boots from Guidi. Back then, menswear was slightly underground. You would recognize fellow travellers on the street, but not often.

Around 2010, however, a number of factors combined to make menswear suddenly mainstream. More men started writing menswear blogs, while Tumblr created a menswear tag—“#menswear”—which allowed fashionable people who had missed out on menswear culture to discover it. At the same time, big fashion retailers began selling menswear style. Most prominently, J. Crew began to feature “grail” items in its stores, as part of a program it called “In Good Company.” (Nick Paumgarten’s 2010 profile of the company’s C.E.O., Mickey Drexler, finds him in Maine, sourcing moccasins from Quoddy.) One by one, the strands of men’s fashion emphasized by menswear—heritage Americana, denim fetishism, Ivy League traditionalism, Italian style, with its “sprezzatura,” or relaxed, studied flair—became popularized. Even the “goth ninja” look has achieved some currency, thanks to Kanye, who has made it his own. Today, on any given city block, you’ll see a man whose outfit contains a hint of menswear: a Filson bag; a narrow, high trouser hem; suede shoes with colored laces; a trim blazer in Italian azure; a waxed jacket or indigo shirt with an ironically large number of pockets. You’ll also see men who are desperate to keep their edge; they’re “dressed by the internet,” in crowded ensembles that are designed to be reblogged.

Looking back, it’s obvious that menswear wasn’t just about fashion. In his new book, “True Style,” the fashion writer G. Bruce Boyer, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of men’s clothing, puts today’s menswear culture in historical perspective. The modern male uniform, Boyer writes, has its roots in the “Great Renunciation” of the nineteenth century, when men “gave up silks and satins, embroidered coats and powdered wigs and silver-buckled shoes in favor of woolen suits simply cut and soberly colored.” That movement “away from gorgeousness and toward simplicity” was political: men were adopting a uniform with “ties to liberal democracy.” (Boyer quotes the fashion historian David Kuchta, who writes that modern men seek to communicate “masculine conceptions of industry and frugality” with their clothes.) Women, the thinking goes, have renounced gorgeousness to a lesser degree, because they can still wear beautiful, aristocratic fabrics, like velvet, without apology; men, by contrast, have been forced to “suppress [their] poetic souls and hide [their] light under a bushel of dreary worsted.”