Why John Mayer Is the Most Stylish Man of the Decade

A message carved into a wooden sign in a TJ Maxx clearance aisle once informed me that failures are just opportunities for growth. That absolutely true nugget helps explain how John Mayer became the most stylish man of the decade: failure. Lots and lots of failure. In 2012, Mayer assembled a fit that, let’s just say, didn’t age well: a white button-up, with a bow tie fastened around the collar, layered underneath a denim jacket. Seven years later, he is one the decade’s best dressers and an unparalleled menswear nerd. That, my friends, is called growth.

Sure, there were potholes along the way: scoop-neck tees, J.Crew shopping montages soundtracked by “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” and bad blazers that gesture loudly toward the hashtag-menswear set. But I’m not here to judge bad fits. The bad fits are just a necessary side effect of really actively participating. And, boy, did John Mayer participate—he was there trying to find out what trends stuck, along with the rest of us. He leaned hard enough into techwear that he fronted an Acronym x Nike campaign with designer Errolson Hugh. But during another phase he embraced hair serums and Panama hats. You could see him navigating through Hypebeast and Style.com and A Continuous Lean and Hodinkee, or flipping through pages of, ahem, GQ in real time.

The truly sensational thing is that Mayer did the math, crunched the numbers, and Good Will Hunting–ed the impossible problem. In 2017, in a GQ Style interview, Mayer described his approach to finding style authenticity as such: “I think it probably works by way of, like, two steps forward, one step back, repeat. I’m OK with dismantling something that works in order to find something else that works down the line.”

This decade, we watched Mayer dismantle and retool his style one outfit at a time until he found a way to melt his favorite ideas into a single, coherent body of fits. He fell so in love with artisanal Japanese workwear brand Visvim that he keeps what he describes as a “healthy representation of each season” in a storage locker in California. But he still manages to mix in the sneakers the rest of us missed out on (here in Off-White x Nikes; here in Fear of Gods), and the occasional Supreme box-logo tee. The result is perfectly calibrated fits like this one: a Hawaiian shirt of thrifted-in-Tokyo caliber, pants uproariously celebrating this current era of oversize bottoms, and Acronym x Nike sneakers. This is a man who has figured it all out.

What becomes clear, as you pore over Mayer fit pics, is his love for the game. He got so many reps earlier in the decade that he reached a new plane of fitsistence. He knows how to mix his love for Japanese workwear, robes, Fear of God track jackets, the very best timepieces, and hype sneakers into one sublime wardrobe. And because everything put onto a sign sold at TJ Maxx is incontrovertibly true, find the nearest plank of wood and etch this onto it: John Mayer is the best-dressed man of the decade.

Originally Appeared on GQ