Today’s culture of covetable menswear is–and always was—anchored by sneakers. Maybe it was the first pair of 1985 Jordans or the riots over the Pigeon Dunk back in 2005 but sneakers and their respective fanatical devotion set the framework for the era of menswear we find ourselves in today. The jargon well-known to modern menswear nerds—“cop,” “fresh,” “drop”—all began with sneakerheads. That’s a cultural vocabulary with real staying power for a generation.

Beyond that, the reason for the pervasiveness of sneakers is pretty straightforward. As others have noted, the rare and collectable nature sneakers have reached have allowed them to fulfill a similar role to that of handbags in the female wardrobe. They can be incredibly expensive, they operate semi-autonomously from the rest of the outfit and they’re bought as a way of signifying taste to other members of your gender. In the same way that most men (at least stereotypically) don’t know the difference between a Birkin and a Neverfull, most women (at least in this paradigm) won’t be able to differentiate between a pair of Yeezy 350s and Mars Yard 2.0s—even though the difference between those two products is cavernous for a sneakerhead. The explosive increase in sneaker sales over the last several years in tandem with increased exlcusivity and evolved design indicate that sneaker-worship has moved beyond a trend and into something more significant.

As sneakers are the item that introduced most men to even the notion of collecting clothes, there’s a great deal of financial investment involved—shoes are usually the most expensive items in a guy’s closet. With sneakers proven staying power, there’s another issue at hand...

It’s funny, a pair of sneakers and a suit are probably the two most classically masculine things in the American wardrobe, as any traditional style guide would argue you need to own a respectable iteration of both. Even still, we have yet to see a compelling way to wear the two simultaneously.

Yes, GQ has been telling us for years that it’s cool to wear sneakers with a suit now but the advice is always, more or less, “just wear minimal sneakers.” That’s fine if you’re a Common Projects kind of guy, but if you’re into something more outre—say Sean Wotherspoon Air Max 97/1s, adidas NMDs or even Balenciaga Triple S’s—you’re out of luck. You can make the argument that Virgil Abloh certainly gave it a shot with his first Louis Vuitton menswear show, but the all of the kicks were paired monochromatically and break of the suits draped over the shoe entirely, making it hard to justify dropping however many hundreds of dollars on a sneaker you can’t see.

If this tailoring renaissance is indeed on the way, you’re asking young people to walk away from a significant amount of money that they’ve invested in the most socially significant element of their wardrobe. That’s a big ask when kids are spending MacBook money on footwear alone, and this recent Slimane collection didn’t feature a single non-dress shoe. The designer who cracks the sneakers-with-a-suit code is certainly going to have an iconic collection on their hands, but we haven’t seen anything close to this just yet. Especially considering the suit’s current cultural standing.

Era’s where men gravitated toward suiting were driven by cultural moments outside of fashion. The ‘50s skinny tie-clad emerging middle class as depicted in Mad Men drove everything from runway shows to Banana Republic collections. ’80s power-suited bankers codified in movies like Wall Street and American Psycho reflected how tailoring became a symbol of hyper-masculine wealth and greed prior to the financial collapse. In 2018, with our unwavering commitment to comfort and increasingly mobile work environment, the same reverence does not exist. Quite the opposite, in fact, considering even our billionaires rarely wear suits (as noted in The Wall Street Journal: "The ubiquitous Wall Street (and, increasingly, Greenwich) look today is a fleece vest worn over a non-iron button-down. It’s camouflage for the 1%: a banal outfit that obscures the depths of their bank account."

When even the richest among us have left suits behind, there’s a vacuum that needs to be filled before suits can once again be identified with anything remotely cool. Yet, we are frankly nowhere near that point. The closest analogue to a Wall Street for the millennial generation (and younger) is The Social Network, where the multi-billionaire dorm-buddies wear T-shirts, cargo shorts and mall-accessible sneakers. The only characters in suits are the bankers that Eisenberg-as-Zuckerberg loves to mock and Eduardo Saverin—but only in the scene where he’s betrayed by the Facebook team in its “Fuck-you flip-flops.” With that as our cultural touchstone, who the hell wants to be the guy in the suit?

Bear in mind, all of this is for the better. It’s a good thing that menswear fans are no longer all as frail and pale as Slimane’s models. His latest collection will likely do fine. His work always does. But is it the harbinger of kids everywhere racing to buy skin tight black jackets and super-slick trousers? Doubt it. Menswear nerds like you and I took the reigns sometime in the last few years and in the process, we sunk dollars that could have been paying our rent into clothing that inherently clashes with Slimane’s aesthetic. There’s room for change, as always, but it’s unlikely to truly make an impact unless it appeals to those who dictate culture. Those people are wearing sneakers.