Men Used to Have Wives. Now They Have Stylists.

Jay Buys’s wife changed his life with 10 words: “You know, you don’t have to just wear band T-shirts.”

Shirts from Nine Inch Nails and Thrice—for years, this was the bulk of Buys’s wardrobe. Were they awesome ? Yes. Did they make him look like the CEO of a successful web design firm? Not quite. “If I looked better, I would’ve felt better,” said Buys, 44, of San Diego. So he hired someone to teach him to look better.

For most, the term “stylist” brings to mind a celebrity dresser putting Timothée Chalamet in a bombastic red carpet outfit. But there is also an industry of white-collar stylists helping hapless corporate types find the right shirts and trousers for their daily lives.

For Buys, that guy was Patrick Kenger.

Kenger runs Pivot, a personal styling service, charging as much as $5,000 to remake your wardrobe. Kenger’s job is part Marie Kondo, part therapist and large part a personal shopper. He helped Buys retire the band tees at work, subbing them with Suitsupply blazers and Bonobos trousers.

The switch had a Superman-bursting-out-of-the-phone-booth effect on Buys. “I look like I know what I’m doing.” Strangers seem to think so, too. He was startled when a random 20-something at the grocery store saw his leather John Varvatos jacket and chirped, “I like your drip, bro!”

Today, strivers in tech, law and finance are wealthier than ever, but corporate dress codes have collapsed. The hoodie-clad billionaire has become a cliché. In the C-suite, Loro Piana sneakers have trounced dress shoes. Fleece vests have vanquished ties. At the same time, we’re in a new era of boardroom boasting.

Executives crow about their pay packages, their workout routines (looking at you Mark Zuckerberg!) and the rarity of their sneakers. To look like you haven’t bought new clothes since we all clutched BlackBerrys is to risk being lapped on the corporate ladder.

So, if you’re sitting there confidently dressed and accepting compliments on how well your pants fit, congrats! But there are many men who lack the skills to piece an outfit together. Stylists say their work has ballooned in the past decade as the range of options on what’s office “appropriate” has waylaid even confident corporate leaders.

“Men are very confused right now with the dress codes that have blurred the lines of formality,” said Jacci Jaye, a white-collar stylist in New York City for two decades, whose services start at $3,800 plus expenses. Jaye, who works solely with executives, said that many of her roughly 50 clients knew what they liked in terms of style, but had no idea how to achieve that look.

“I looked sloppy and I didn’t want to look sloppy,” said Raj Nangunoori, 36, a neurosurgeon in Austin. He spent working hours in scrubs, but out of them, he was adrift. “Even shorts, like I was never great at picking out shorts,” Nangunoori said.

Around a year ago, he googled in search of a stylist and hired Peter Nguyen, a former menswear designer turned $10,000 stylist. Nguyen’s entrepreneur- and tech-type clients are long on money, short on time and scant on clothing knowledge.

Nguyen’s first step is a lengthy questionnaire: What music do you listen to, what are your hobbies, where do you vacation? “I view my clients like they’re characters in a movie,” he said. They give him their background and Nguyen’s job is to outfit that character.

The pair landed on a neat framework for Nangunoori’s new look: What would Ryan Reynolds wear? Prosaic tees were swapped for polo-neck sweaters and James Perse chinos were tailored to fit properly. Nguyen got Nangunoori into a pair of Common Projects minimalist $500-ish sneakers. Most importantly, he convinced him to ditch his shopping mistake paint-splattered jeans.

“I can’t pull off what Travis Scott’s wearing,” said Nangunoori, relaying all his hard-bought wisdom.

Like working with a trainer, some clients are wary of admitting they enlisted a fashion guru. One CEO I spoke with who hired a stylist told his business partner he had done so, only to be mocked. After that, he decided “I’m not talking to anyone.”

“I never had my own confidence in going shopping and buying suits or dress clothes or even my weekend stuff,” said Nate Dudek, 42, an executive at a software company living in East Hampton, Conn. A “technology nerd,” Dudek wasn’t born with a strong visual sense. “That goes from everything from picking a wall color in my house to the way I dress.” His tees-and-jeans wardrobe was as spicy as a glass of milk.

In 2022, about one year before co-founding his own company, Dudek “set out to invest in myself” by hiring Cassandra Sethi, a New York stylist behind the company Next Level Wardrobe whose services currently start at $5,500. Dudek’s wife, who has “killer style” and occasionally shopped for him, took some warming up to the idea. “She was like, ‘Why? I’m so good at buying you clothes!’”

But Dudek wanted an objective outside advisor—someone who didn’t know him as intimately as his wife—to overhaul his closet. (His wife has come around, and is relieved to not be his unpaid personal shopper.)

He never even had to meet her in person. Sethi shipped him boxes of clothes and over a three-hour Zoom session they deduced what suited him best. The transformation, Dudek said, “was fairly obvious.” Colleagues commented that he was carrying himself differently in his new grey Ted Baker blazer, and Save Khaki United’s trim tees. “I felt it too,” he said.

It is a cliché—but a factual one—that in many relationships, the wife or better-dressed husband is the begrudging fashion consultant. Supreet Chahal, a personal stylist in Oakland specializing in tech guys, says many clients come in saying “my girlfriend tried to help me, my wife tried out on me, but she keeps dressing me the way she wants me to look.”

Marco Rodriguez’s former girlfriend didn’t shop for him, but did steer him towards Nguyen a few years ago. “She was like, ‘Hey listen, I know you hate shopping,” said the 39-year-old musician and entrepreneur in Austin.

And oh, he did. Rodriguez could never find pants that fit his “interesting physique.” When he needed new clothes, he had to force himself to buy them. His style was directionless. “ I knew what I wanted but I just didn’t know how to get there.”

With Nguyen’s assistance, Rodriguez landed on a sort of “Soho boho, I hate to say rockstar” look of low-key Justin Theroux-style leather jackets, Chelsea boots and pieces from Parisian label Officine Générale. The experience “got me out of my comfort zone,” Rodriguez said.

The mindlessness that comes from working with a stylist is enticing to efficiency-obsessed tech workers. “I don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking in the morning,” said Michael Peter, 53, a principal architect at Google in cloud technology. Previously, he dressed like your standard tech worker—jeans, tennis shoes, the odd Batman tee—but a lightbulb went off during one meeting when he watched a better-dressed colleague take charge.

“He walked in the room, he had gravitas,” said Peter. Striving for that same effect, he hired Sethi of Next Level Wardrobe. She directed him toward a “refined elevated casual look” of slender-but-stretchy Vuori pants (which accommodate his gym-rat legs) and James Perse polos. Rather than his girlfriend telling him what to buy, he says, she’s stealing his clothes “all the time.”

To be sure, all of this comes at a cost. Businessmen I spoke with view the hefty fees as an investment, like renting a well-appointed office.

“The cost didn’t faze me a bit,” said Aaron Preman, 48, who owns a roofing company in San Diego, and hired Kenger at around $3,500.

“He taught me a lot in a short amount of time,” Preman said. He discovered that wintery colours suit his olive complexion and that he really likes Theory suits and Zegna ’s $990 triple-stitch sneakers—he now owns several pairs. The cost of everything—the guidance, the clothes—has been worth it to Preman. “He could’ve told me $10,000 and I would’ve said, ‘Okay, when are you coming over?’”

U.S. investors’ enthusiasm over Japanese stocks at this time last year turned out to be misplaced, but the market is again on the list of potential ways to diversify. Corporate shake-ups, hints of inflation after years of declining prices, and a trade battle could work in its favor.

Japanese stocks started 2024 off strong, but an unexpected interest-rate increase in August by the Bank of Japan triggered a sharp decline that the market has spent the rest of the year clawing back. Weakness in the yen has cut into returns in dollar terms. The iShares MSCI Japan ETF , which isn’t hedged, barely returned 7% last year, compared with 30% for the WisdomTree Japan Hedged Equity Fund .

The market is relatively cheap, trading at 15 times forward earnings, about where it was a decade ago, and events on the horizon could give it a boost. Masakazu Takeda, who runs the Hennessy Japan fund, expects earnings growth of mid-single digits—2% after inflation and an additional 2% to 3% as companies return more to shareholders through dividends and buybacks.

“We can easily get 10% plus returns if there’s no exogenous risks,” Takeda told Barron’s in December.

The first couple months of the year could be volatile as investors assess potential spoilers, such as whether the new Trump administration limits its tariff battle to China or goes wider, which would hurt Japan’s export-dependent market. The size of the wage increases labor unions secure in spring negotiations is another risk.

But beyond the headlines, fund managers and strategists see potential positive factors. First, 2024 will likely turn out to have been a record year for corporate earnings because some companies have benefited from rising prices and increasing demand, as well as better capital allocation.

In a note to clients, BofA strategist Masashi Akutsu said the market may again focus on a shift in corporate behavior that has begun to take place in recent years. For years, corporate culture has been resistant to change but recent developments—a battle over Seven & i Holdings that pits the founding family and investors against a bid from Canada’s Alimentation Couche-Tard , and Honda and Nissan ’s merger are examples—have been a wake-up call for Japanese companies to pursue overhauls. He expects a pickup in share buybacks as companies begin to think about shareholder returns more.

A record number of companies have also delisted, often through management buyouts, in another indication that corporate behavior is changing in favor of shareholders.

“Japan is attracting a lot of activist interest in a lot of different guises, says Donald Farquharson, head of the Japanese equities team for Baillie Gifford. “While shareholder proposals are usually unsuccessful, they do start in motion a process behind the scenes about the capital structure.”

For years, money-losing businesses were left alone in large corporations, but the recent spate of activism and focus on shareholder returns has pushed companies to jettison such divisions or take measures to improve them.

That isn‘t to say it is going to be an easy year. A more protectionist world could be problematic for sentiment.

But Japan’s approach could become a model for others in this new world. “Japan has spent the last 30 to 40 years investing in business overseas, with the automotive industry, for example, manufacturing a lot of the cars in the geographies it sells in,” Farquharson said. “That’s true of a lot of what Japan is selling overseas.”

Trade volatility that hits Japanese stocks broadly could offer opportunities. Concerns about tariffs could drag down companies such as Tokio Marine Holdings, which gets half its earnings by selling insurance in the U.S., but wouldn’t be affected by duties. Similarly, Shin-Etsu Chemicals , a silicon wafer behemoth that sells critical materials, including to the chip industry, is another potential winner, Takeda says.

If other companies follow the lead of Japanese exporters and set up shop in the markets they sell in, Japanese automation makers like Nidec and Keyence might benefit as a way to control costs in countries where wages are higher, Farquharson says.

And as Japanese workers get real wage growth and settle into living in an economy no longer in a deflationary rut, companies focused on domestic consumers such as Rakuten Group should benefit. The internet company offers retail and travel, both of which should benefit, but also is home to an online banking and investment platform.

Rakuten’s enterprise value—its market capitalization plus debt—is still less than its annual sales, in part because the company had been investing heavily in its mobile network. But that division is about to hit break even, Farquharson says.

A stock that stands to benefit from consumer spending and the waves or tourists the weak yen is attracting is Orix , a conglomerate whose businesses include an international airport serving Osaka. The company’s aircraft-leasing business also benefits from the production snags and supply-chain disruptions at Airbus and Boeing , Takeda says.

An added benefit: Its financial businesses stand to get a boost as the Bank of Japan slowly normalizes interest rates. The stock trades at about nine times earnings and about par for book value, while paying a 4% dividend yield.

Corrections & Amplifications: The past year is expected to turn out to have been a record one for corporate earnings in Japan. An earlier version of this article incorrectly gave the time frame as the 12 months through March. Separately, Masashi Akutsu is a strategist at BofA. An earlier version incorrectly identified his employer as UBS.