Life Is So Hard for Hot Guys: Paris Menswear’s Fashionistos on Heatwave Style

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When it comes to gender relations, men are not oppressed. We get that. But when it comes to hot weather dressing? Oh my God, you have no idea. Right now Europe is enduring an unprecedented heatwave. From London to Lisbon the tarmac is melting. And that’s a real problem for guys. Because, as Liana Satenstein so thoroughly explored in her terrifying recent piece “Are Men in Shorts the Worst? Let’s Discuss,” men cannot respond to the duress of pounding heat by simply stripping down—at least not if they don’t want to be exposed to a laser female gaze that will cast aspersion on Hobbit-like hairy calf and retch at even the hint of unmanicured toe.

Sometimes, though, it’s just too hot. Right now is that time. Today in France the bus drivers of Nantes responded to a uniform edict that forbids them from wearing shorts but not from turning up to work in skirts—which according to the letter of the law are not prohibited. Here in fashion land, the editors and buyers at Paris Menswear Week today expressed solidarity with our Nantes bus-driver brothers by finding our own coping mechanisms for the soaring mercury. This morning at Issey Miyake, the house handed out chemical ice packs to every showgoer, and we gathered to discuss the long hot day ahead. Guy Trebay of the New York Times and I made a pact to go to a tourist shop and buy baseball hats with integrated fans. We never got around to it. Matthew Schneier of the Times inserted his ice pack into the collar of his Balenciaga shirt, then rested limply on his bench like a lizard, gently agitating his Miyake pants to enable aeration. Nick Sullivan of Esquire wistfully described the one time he wore a kilt—“there’s . . . just nothing there. It’s so airy”—while strongly advocating a wide-weave fabric he’d encountered in Milan last week. We contemplated the dots of sweat rising like rebukes on one another’s shirt fronts. Then retailer Josh Peskowitz—a former haunter of our side of the bench— turned up and stole the show. He was wearing an Engineered Garments romper suit in a subtly patterned blue cotton jacquard. “I’ve never worn shorts to a show before,” he confessed, “but if there’s a day to wear this, it’s today.” He looked magnificent: like a big hairy directional menswear baby.

Across town at Ami, designer Alexandre Mattiussi had kindly laid on Ami-branded water. Backstage his advice for what to wear to the menswear shows was bold. “Just don’t go to the shows! Except mine of course.” But we couldn’t do that. On Ami’s pink sand runway, Nick Wooster—the doyen of modern menswear—cut the jugular of that shorts prejudice by simply rocking a pair (by Rick Owens with a Rick tank top and some Nikes). “You’ve just gotta do it,” he wisely observed. Across the row, Grant Pearce, the Australian big cheese in GQ Asia Pacific, was looking frankly pristine in a pale linen suit by a Chinese tailor whose name he couldn’t immediately recall. “Heat is a state of mind, really,” he said. “If you don’t feel it, you don’t feel it.” But it looked like he was feeling it.

On to Rick Owens. The big one. Rick threw his fabulous show in the courtyard of the Palais de Tokyo. It was beautiful. But hot. His team had sent out an email warning of the potential extreme temperature the day before, and so it came to pass. Even with the sun hats, fans, and water he so kindly provided, it was a sweat fest. Encased in our pants, we stared wistfully at the shirtless short-shorts of his first look. Fashion is so cruel. Among us, only two mavericks, Nick Remsen of Vogue and Charlie Porter of the Financial Times, were rocking a truly short-short. As Nick confessed on WhatsApp later, “I literally wore my brother’s shorts from track team. They were marginally scandalous.”

Even Louis Vuitton can’t control the weather—although if any house ever works out how to, it will be that one. At Kim Jones’s show at the Palais Royal, the heat was horrendous. Edward Enninful, the newly appointed editor in chief of British Vogue, rocked up to support Kim with his longtime sister in crime Naomi Campbell alongside him. Enninful is a visionary image maker, lovely guy, and general gent. However, when it comes to hot-weather dressing, his judgment today sucked. He wore a black suit with a black shirt and looked as comfortable as you would expect. “Oh my God!” he said. “Oh my God! The thing is I only ever wear black. But I think I’m going to have to change that.” Backstage after Vuitton, the Scottish designer Charles “Loverboy” Jeffrey breezed in wearing a 50-pence floral dress he’d bought in a London thrift store. “I’m so cool!” he said, and he was. Even if his yellow hair paint was running a little.

At this point your correspondent retired back to his Airbnb to write Rick Owens and take a long cold shower. It was great—I was fresh as a daisy and as dry as a backstage interview with Karl Lagerfeld—until the metro stalled for 12 minutes between stations on the way to Dries Van Noten afterward. My Massimo Alba polo shirt was a rorschach test of sweat as I ran to Dries, and even the handheld fans we were handed could not quell the flow. Once I’d climbed to the top of the venue, the former HQ of Paris newspaper Liberation, I met the ultimate rebuke: Bruce Pask. Bergdorf Goodman’s style Svengali was frankly immaculate in a white cotton Henley. He had “triple-showered. Triple-showering is the only solution.” To add insult to injury, my former colleague Alexander Fury viciously Instagrammed a picture of me fanning myself at the ensuing show—the fan was from Rick—although he did at least have the grace to edit out the enormous putrescent spot the heat had helped ferment by my nose. I watched the show. There were a lot of shorts. “Ugh!” said Sarah Mower alongside me at the lavish display of calf. I sighed and shifted damply in my chinos. Hot weather is nature’s revenge on men. And we probably deserve it.