It was impossible to see this tragedy coming, and so quickly, but the rosy goggles of hindsight suggest that men’s fashion has been conspiring toward a certain kind of reckoning. Look at the post-apocalyptic sensibility of Errolson Hughes’s Acronym and the young French upstart Marine Serre. Or designers like Virgil Abloh and Demna Gvasalia, who packed the sweatsuit, the premiere working-from-home uniform, with as much semiotic chutzpah and design rigor as the tailored suit. The Fall 2020 collections of Loewe, Dries Van Noten, and Rick Owens, shown in Europe this past January, were celebrations of the act and art of dressing up, of fashion as a performance. Anything can become an occasion if you have the right outfit—even the act of putting on outfits itself!

Enter the new era of homebound style. Since mid-March, as millions of people in the United States, and countless others around the world, have been sheltering in place, we have left our homes only for necessities or as essential workers. So we asked GQ friends and family to capture themselves in their biggest fits from home. Some have adjusted to a new reality in sweatpants, but many people have embraced this new era by dressing up and taking advantage of the pure joy and solace clothing can provide. There is salvation in putting on clothes. There is a small human dignity in putting on a big fit. And as some of these subjects show, there is transcendence in reaching for an untamed color palette and a wild silhouette and never looking back.

If you don’t leave the house, after all, that impossible dream of wearing a cropped pink double-breasted suit is suddenly so doable, as Laker Kyle Kuzma demonstrates. Or how about a spaghetti-strap top and zip-front latex-ass pants, like Ian Isiah? When every day is an off-day from human contact, you can freak it every day. Isiah freaks it every day regardless, but still: Your inner self becomes your only self. Sure, we might have an audience for our fits on Instagram, but never has that group been so secondary to our own needs and desires, whether those are met by soft drapes, like Rhuigi Villaseñor’s unraveling knit, with bone-tone house shoes, or by the exacting psychedelica of Kyle Kuzma’s hot-pink suit. The fit pic has become a balm: It’s nice to know, for example, that while you may now find yourself slathering on some kind of green-tea lotion every afternoon for 20 minutes, #masking for Orville Peck still means a Lone Ranger bandanna and foot-long silk fringe.

Amid the alienation of social distancing, the fit pic welcomes the world into our homes. Some small part of your brain may never be the same after seeing A$AP Ferg’s Jeff Koonsian balloon lamp, or Leon Bridges’s mind-blowing group portrait of Frank Ocean and Willie Nelson and Frederick Douglass. The domestic space can be as fantastical as any fashion spread: Faith Lynch in a leather minidress, with the blue flame of her gas stove providing the ahooga commentary, and Gunna, still going 100 percent Gunna in the full Prada kit including the crossbody harness, with a mountain of Goyard just beyond. Look at fitspo god J. Balvin’s closet. This is where the (fit) magic happens, baby!

This is not a time to keep calm and carry on, but a moment to reflect who we are and who we want to be. Clothes may not have the answers. But they’ll be there with us no matter what. —Rachel Tashjian