Why Everybody in SoHo Dresses Like This Now
In the 1970s, Manhattan’s SoHo was a frontier land of cheap and drafty artist lofts and bootstrapped galleries and not much else. Today, it’s a plein air shopping mall. In the intervening decades, “SoHo” became shorthand for the ineffable quality that gets packaged as “downtown,” a byword co-opted by brands looking to lend their slacks the sheen of urbane cool. The indifferent cruelty of New York real estate turned the ineffable effable, and sometime in the early aughts, SoHo completed its transformation into a playpen for the moneyed classes, who, naturally, demanded outposts of global luxury brands and direct-to-consumer, tech-adjacent, washable wool footwear.
Still, there were bright spots. Pace-setting retail concepts like Opening Ceremony flourished, and boutiques like Agnès b. carved out space for art and photography exhibits alongside génial T-shirts. The spectacle of avant-shopping in SoHo meant that, for a while, it was reliably the best place to see new ideas in dressing and, critically, to be seen flaunting them, too.
Times change. Opening Ceremony announced last week it plans to close its stores. SoHo, once home to a downtown branch of the Guggenheim (now a Prada store), isn’t even hospitable to Philipp Plein, who vacated his short-lived, neon-hung horror on the corner of Mercer and Grand streets. Physical retail is constricting uptown and down, Barneys is enduring a protracted live burial, and New York’s toniest commercial corridors are pocked with papered-up storefronts. It’s hard to comprehend how, in one of the wealthiest precincts of Manhattan, there can be no home for Dean & DeLuca’s $48-per-pound Nova lox.
How do we make sense of the dramatically changing shape of SoHo’s retail ecosystem, or the shifts in taste and mood that portend it? With a joke on the internet, naturally: an image of a patently unstylish look, paired with the authoritative phrase “Everybody in SoHo dresses like this now.” The best versions of the joke, which began to emerge in early 2018, invoke some ’90s-era cultural figure whose long-outdated style is made to look prescient by its latter-day revival: Miranda Hobbes in overalls and Superstars; George Costanza embalmed in bulbous Gore-TEX; Joe Pesci circa Wet Bandits micro-beanie era; Dennis Rodman’s whole thing; Steve from Blue’s Clues. The gag assumes a level of institutional understanding—a secret handshake between New Yorkers in and around the fashion trade who had identified a few prevailing trends in taste and styling, some of which had become punchlines in themselves.
The phrase, like most everything that metastasizes on the internet, straddles the line between tossed-off in-joke and trenchant social critique. Are men literally dressing themselves like Nathan’s humanoid frankfurter or second-tier Muppets? Nearly, yes. But, more importantly, “Everybody in SoHo dresses like this” locates a climate of arrested adolescence that can seem to have overwhelmed contemporary menswear and made it the target of easy derision. SoHo is the logical, psychic home of this strain of menswear, a non-place where you could be into luxury goods made to look chintzy, or maximalist brand loyalty, or camp shirts, or tumorous sneakers or dad hats, but also make fun of the people into those things.
Who hangs out in SoHo? Luxury’s big boys all have a footprint, but so does the streetwear macrocosm: More conspicuous than the Moncler-clad Europeans with wealthy-looking skin are the zealous young men oscillating between Supreme and Palace, Off-White and BAPE, spilling out into the hotbox that forms most afternoons between VFILES and NikeLab like a shoal of collab-addled bream. More often than not, “everybody in SoHo” refers not to the neighborhood’s residents, the hedgies and traders and phantom Russian oil czars who actually own the $10 million porticoed condos rising above Greene Street, but rather to those who enter streetwear’s Red Zone to flesh out their Kith wardrobe.
It is, of course, ridiculous to suggest a monolithic dress code has overtaken an entire New York City neighborhood, but it also isn’t incorrect. The recognition puts some distance between those for whom hundred-dollar sweatpants sound like a good buy and those for whom the next New Balance collaboration might result in a psychic break. It’s a knowing aside, a push against an overheated climate of boring loopback sameness, a refusal of Instagram-flattened style. To make the joke is to announce a deep exhaustion with much of menswear’s fixations, alongside a deep familiarity with them: an inflationary sneaker aftermarket, workwear-clad creative directors, unresolved traumas that manifest in a skatewear fetish. It’s a gentle bit of fun that, if you understand “SoHo” as a synecdoche for men’s fashion at large, becomes instructive. It likely won’t be recognized by science, but to look at the past two years’ worth of this meme is to reference a street-level ethnographic document of menswear.
Perhaps the most salient part of “Everybody in SoHo dresses like this now” is its melancholic tinge, an incredulity couched in resignation. Before everyone in SoHo dressed like this, just a few intrepid souls did. And so each entry exists as a little elegy. We woke up one morning and everyone was tie-dying their Nike tube socks, something we were sure, as sure as we were breathing, was not the done thing. What happens when we can’t recognize our own city? Our shopping districts, ourselves.
Originally Appeared on GQ
