Stylish guys are now embracing a refined, almost old-timey, style: ‘It projects power and confidence.’
3 min
On a recent trip to the new Manhattan flagship for Stòffa, a menswear brand, Colin King made a beeline for the back of the store. The 36-year-old stylist and artistic director had booked a made-to-measure appointment—but not for a suit. Instead, he chose a cotton-silk shirt, relaxed pants in a classy wool, and a drapey, chocolate-brown shirt-jacket, all for his everyday wardrobe. He also snapped up slipperlike suede loafers. “They’re so handsome,” he said.
Lately, the way men like King dress has undergone a subtle shift. Those in the know have been embracing a more refined and considered, if not quite formal, style. “There’s a real move toward relaxed elegance,” said London designer and tailor Charlie Casely-Hayford. “It looks effortless, there’s a nonchalance, but it projects power and confidence.” Stòffa, a newly buzzy, 10-year-old label embodies the look.
Despite a few modern tweaks, we’re talking about the kind of get-ups that Cary Grant might have worn to lounge about—polished yet unstuffy, and with a certain old-timey appeal. The look is linked to the much-talked-about “quiet luxury” movement, but it often has “more personality than quiet luxury,” said David Telfer, creative director at British brand Sunspel. Think flowy, pleated pants, bold polos, souped-up chore jackets and loafers with waferish soles.
Lots of men who now crave easy elegance were stocking up on streetwear a year ago, according to Dag Granath, co-founder of Saman Amel, a Stockholm brand known for its tasteful tailoring. “What we’re seeing is that a 28-to-38-year-old customer is swapping out [streetwear from] high-end fashion labels for a bit of tailoring to anchor the rest of their wardrobe on,” said Granath.
Jon Gorrigan, 43, a fashion photographer in London, used to live in casual streetwear. But he’s “dressing smarter now,” he said, “more like my grandfather, who was a real sharp dresser. He wasn’t a rich man, but he always looked elegant.” He’s swapped sweatshirts for striped polos from London brand King & Tuckfield, and the odd fun piece like a faded Gitman Vintage Hawaiian shirt. Dressing “with more consideration,” as he put it, “makes you feel more grown-up.”
A pair of Saint Laurent loafers were Gorrigan’s entrée into elegance. “They are lower profile, which feels more streamlined, with a subtle monogram,” he said. Indeed, slim-soled shoes, from moccasins to sneakers, help define the modern Cary Grant look. “Men want slimmed-down shoes to go with the new, smarter, classic look,” said Tim Little, creative director and CEO at Grenson, a British shoemaker. The chunky, lug-sole bases that have reigned for years appear to have undertaken a juice cleanse. Current hot, refined styles include leather slippers by Lemaire, Saman Amel’s suede moccasins, and super-lean sneakers like Dries Van Noten’s suede style and Miu Miu’s interpretation of the New Balance 530. A finer shoe “feels a bit more dressy and chic, and won’t dominate the whole outfit in the way a chunky boot would,” said Granath.
Such streamlined kicks go nicely with flowy linen trousers, dark denim and polo shirts—whether preppy buttoned styles or “Johnny collar” polos , a sexier, buttonless take. Sunspel reports that sales of its Riviera polo, a trim design sported by Daniel Craig in “Casino Royale” (2006), have increased by 51% in the U.S. in the last four months, year on year. On the brand’s website, this polo is most often bought with an unstructured linen blazer, noted Telfer.
Those who want a tad less formality than a blazer will appreciate how the humble chore jacket is being reworked in luxe fabrics. The results feel easy yet urbane. See Zegna ’s floppy, silk-linen take, or upcoming fall designs from Scotland’s Johnstons of Elgin made from premium merino and Scottish tweed.
Though elegant dressing reads as expensive, you can score the look at reasonable prices. Accessible labels like Madewell, Percival and Cos sell sophisticated polos and roomy, pleated trousers. Meanwhile, you can find streamlined loafers at OG brand G.H. Bass for $175.
Elegant needn’t be boring, noted Bryan O’Sullivan, 42, a design-studio founder who’s based in both London and New York. His workday uniform consists of high-waist pants and taupe knit polos, “which does feel quite Cary Grant,” he said. But he’ll occasionally add “a splash of flair” with choice items like Bode cream pants embellished with quilted cats.
He said the confidence that this pulled-together, slightly offbeat look projects is good for business. “When you’re trying to convince a client of your creative vision, it does help if you look the part.”
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AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.
4 min
A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.
For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.
There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.
When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.
That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.
Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.
By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.
In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.
Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.
Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”
Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”
Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.
AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.
