Seven Days In New York City Showed Me How ‘Fashion Lazy’ Australians Have Become

I spent seven days in New York in October, and the thing I keep coming back to isn’t the food, the skyline or the price of a martini. It’s how the people dress.

Walk any street in Manhattan or Brooklyn and you’ll see more genuine personal style in ten minutes than you’ll see in a month in most Australian cities. It’s confronting, and it’s worth unpacking.

New York is a genuine melting pot, and you feel it moving from the West Village to SoHo to the Lower East Side to Williamsburg. Every neighbourhood has its own accent, its own food and its own crowd.

What’s more striking is how well everyone dresses, and how edgy they’re willing to be on an ordinary Tuesday. It doesn’t matter whether they’re heading to the office, the bodega or the dog park, they’ve clearly thought about what they’ve put on.

It isn’t one or two fashion people standing outside a gallery either. It’s street after street, person after person, each with a look that’s obviously their own rather than something lifted off a mannequin.

The fashion press clocked the same shift at September’s shows. Italian outlet nss magazine found New York Fashion Week street style had grown up, with less excess, more personal identity and a return to clean contemporary tailoring.

The Trousers Have Gone Wide, And They’re Not Coming Back

If one thing defines the New York silhouette right now, it’s the trouser. They’re ultra wide, they pool slightly over the shoe, and they’re worn by everyone from finance guys to skaters.

This isn’t a fashion week niche anymore either. As Permanent Style pointed out this year, Suitsupply, a brand built on skinny tailoring, launched its first wide-leg fit in 2022, and Uniqlo followed with wide cuts in 2023. When Uniqlo is doing it, the trend has officially left the building, and if you’re still working out how to pull it off, we’ve covered how men should wear baggy pants and wide-leg jeans.

Denim has followed the same path. Los Angeles label John Elliott built a cult following on its slim, Japanese selvedge Cast 2 jean, and it was long my go-to for denim. I dropped into the store in New York only to discover my legs had become too big and chunky for the styles I’d always loved, which was humbling, and also strangely good timing.

The Cast 2 has since been reworked with more room through the thigh, and the brand now leans on looser, straight-leg styles like The Daze. When the slim-denim specialists start cutting wider, the shift is well and truly locked in, and guys with actual thighs can finally breathe.

Pair a wide trouser with a cropped or boxy jacket and you get proportions that look deliberate. It’s a small change that makes an everyday outfit look like it came from someone who knows what they’re doing.

Wider trousers also need a shoe with a bit of heft, because a skinny sneaker or a slim dress shoe gets swallowed by all that fabric. The answer we found in New York was Viberg, the Canadian bootmaker that Swedish immigrant Edwin Viberg founded in Saskatchewan in 1931, and which is now run by his grandson Brett and still handcrafts its footwear in Victoria, British Columbia.

It started out making boots for loggers, and its signature Service Boot is closely related to World War II era military boots. Its turn toward fashion came in 2003, when Japanese retailer Nepenthes asked for a custom pair, and these days most Viberg customers have never felled a tree.

They’re not cheap, but they’re the perfect partner for relaxed trousers and wider jeans. The chunky, rounded toe and solid sole give a wide hem something to sit on, and they look better the more beaten up they get, which is exactly the point.

Layering, And The Women Doing It Best

New York was cooling down in October, and the layering was next level. Guys wore shirt jackets over hoodies, overshirts under chore coats and knitwear peeking out from under leather, all finished with a beanie or a cap.

Hats get worn like part of the outfit rather than a cover for a bad hair day. Refinery29’s coverage of New York’s autumn/winter shows was all layers, big coats, statement hats and reliable boots, which is basically what every second person on the subway looks like.

Australians do have an excuse. It’s hard to layer when it’s 34 degrees in Bondi in January, but that excuse falls apart in Melbourne in July, where plenty of men still throw a puffer over a t-shirt and call it a day.

This piece is about menswear, but it would be dishonest not to say it plainly. The women of New York look incredible, and it isn’t close.

Think perfectly tailored wide-leg trousers with heels, cropped blouson jackets, sharp leather jackets and immaculate coats, worn on the way to the office, the gym or the corner deli. Every single one of them looks clearly, deliberately put together, without ever looking like she’s tried too hard.

There’s a shared silhouette, a high waist, a wide leg and a shorter jacket on top, yet every woman does something slightly different with it. One adds a scarf, another a vintage bag, another a pair of sneakers instead of heels, and the result is a city full of women who are on trend and still entirely themselves.

SoHo has also become one giant outdoor studio. Walk down Mercer Street on any given afternoon and you’ll pass a staggering number of women filming TikToks and shooting Instagram fashion content, tripods on the cobblestones, outfit changes in doorways and friends playing photographer at every corner.

It’s been building for years. Gothamist noted back in 2021 that SoHo shopping had become a recurring fixture in New York influencer videos, and the neighbourhood now feels less like a shopping district and more like a permanent street style set. Locals may roll their eyes, but it says a lot about the city when the footpath itself is the runway.

Put them next to the average Australian bloke in shorts and a polo and the gap is almost embarrassing. In most couples you walk past in New York, both people have made an effort, which is not something you can say about a Saturday arvo in Sydney.

The good news for men is that the formula translates almost perfectly. Swap the heels for a loafer or a chunky boot and you’ve got the best-dressed men’s outfit in the city.

It’s an odd quirk, but you can spot the Australians in New York, and they’re often dressed better than they ever would be at home. They’ve packed their good pieces and actually bothered to put them together.

That’s the effort factor in action. Most Australian men already own a decent pair of trousers, a good jacket and a cap, they just don’t combine them on a Tuesday in Sydney, where the guy in tailored pants at the local cafe still cops a bit of stick from his mates. If we’re happy to make the effort for strangers in SoHo, there’s no good reason not to make it at home.

This isn’t a new complaint either. South Yarra tailor Andrew Tolley told 3AW that Australian men stick out like sore thumbs overseas because of how sloppily they dress, and that they simply aren’t stepping up.

We’ve been here before at DMARGE too. Stylist Jeff Lack, who has more than 20 years in the Australian fashion industry, has told us tailoring is the biggest fix for guys who think they dress well but don’t.

Is Vintage The New Luxury?

Vintage and second-hand shopping in New York is huge, and it’s a big reason so many people there look individual. When half your wardrobe is one-off pieces from the 70s, 80s and 90s, it’s very hard to look like everyone else at the pub.

Military surplus is part of it too, with old US forces shirt jackets and field gear turning up on guys who wear them with wide trousers rather than combat boots. Roadbook’s guide rates L Train for affordable American vintage classics, while Time Out points menswear hunters to Stock Vintage, whose worn-in Americana is exactly what heritage brands try to copy.

At the pricier end, The RealReal sells authenticated second-hand luxury out of a big SoHo space at 80 Wooster Street, and the menswear racks there are worth a look for anyone who wants designer pieces without designer prices.

The energy in New York’s shopping streets isn’t coming from the big luxury houses either. It’s coming from labels like A.P.C. and AMI, both full of considered, wearable pieces that would work just as well in Sydney as in SoHo, although every rack is stocked for a northern winter just as Australia heads into summer.

What you won’t find is this look in the big mainstream labels, your Tommy Hilfigers and the like. Ralph Lauren is the exception, and it does it extremely well through RRL, its vintage-inspired Americana line, but beyond that it’s surprisingly hard to find brands in that space, mostly because getting a great trouser right is an art form few labels have mastered.

Suitsupply has come good with some genuinely excellent wide-leg cuts after years of skinny tailoring, and Uniqlo and COS both carry more relaxed silhouettes, so the building blocks are out there. To be fair, it’s horses for courses, because head to Milan and the men are still wearing slim trousers and looking fantastic doing it.

The New York look, though, takes work. It’s rarely bought off one rack in one shop, it’s built by mixing new pieces with vintage finds, and that takes time, patience and a bit of an eye.

That’s where Australia falls down. We simply don’t have the depth of retail New York has, which pushes most men online, where you can’t feel the fabric, sizing is a gamble, international returns are a nightmare, and wide trousers are the one garment where fit is everything.

Streetwear And The Queue Out Front

Smart street style may be leading the way, but streetwear still has a real presence in New York. You see it on every block, just worn with more thought than it used to be, a good hoodie under a wool coat or a pair of collab sneakers with pleated trousers.

Kith is still a monster. Ronnie Fieg, who grew up in Queens and started out as a teenage stock boy at his cousin’s shoe store on 8th Street, has turned it into a global business with more than 20 stores across three continents, and Complex ranked him first on its 2026 Streetwear Power Ranking. Its spring 2026 collection even mixed technical gear with Italian tailoring, which is the New York look in one sentence.

It’s also impossible to talk about New York style without crediting Black culture, which has driven so much of what the rest of the world ends up wearing. Long before luxury houses caught on, Harlem designer Dapper Dan was dressing rappers and the neighbourhood’s elite from his 125th Street boutique, and his work became a pivotal influence on men’s fashion and hip-hop’s look.

That influence is now firmly in the mainstream. The Met’s 2025 Costume Institute exhibition was built around Black menswear and dandyism, a tradition Dapper Dan helped define, and Pharrell Williams sits at Louis Vuitton as Men’s Creative Director. Walk through Harlem, Bed-Stuy or the Lower East Side and you see that lineage everywhere, in the confidence, the tailoring and the willingness to dress up for an ordinary day.

Then there are the lines. On a Saturday afternoon there were 40 or 50 people waiting to get into Stüssy and Aimé Leon Dore, and nobody seemed remotely bothered.

Ten years ago, the only people lining up for clothes were sneakerheads camping out for a drop. Now it’s ordinary guys in their 20s and 30s queuing for a sweatshirt, and it’s hard to picture 50 blokes lining up outside a menswear store on Oxford Street in Paddington, which says everything.

To be fair, a few labels down here are already on the New York wavelength, and we’ve written about how Australian menswear has gone from afterthought to world class. Alfie’s Mission, started by mates Ollie Bracewell and Nick Truelove over beers about how boring men’s streetwear had become, is doing bigger cuts with plenty of personality.

Across the Tasman, Porter James is doing it even better. The Auckland label now does 75 per cent of its business internationally, with a strong following in New York, Melbourne and Los Angeles, which tells you exactly whose wardrobe it fits into.

The broader Australian market, though, is still on holiday. Venroy calls linen its hero and does resort wear very well, but tellingly its first North American store opened in Montauk, the beach town on the tip of Long Island, not Manhattan.

There are Australian men dressing like New Yorkers, they’re just few and far between. Content creator Nate Campbell is a good example, a 30-something who mixes caps, wide-leg trousers and properly cut suits in a way that would blend straight into SoHo.

His Instagram feed, followed by more than 130,000 people, is basically a masterclass in the New York formula. One day it’s pleated grey wide-legs with a white tank, the next it’s a black tee, burgundy trousers and a cap, and then he’s in a tuxedo looking like he owns the room, and his bio sums up the attitude by telling followers to wear the energy they want to put out into the world.

Shaun Birley is another one worth watching. He’s built his name mostly on suiting, but lately he’s been drifting in the New York direction, pairing good shirts and proper trousers with a baseball cap, which shows the smart street style look isn’t a streetwear thing, it’s simply where well-dressed men are heading.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Gen Z uniform. It’s big baggy shorts, a cropped t-shirt, white socks pulled up and a pair of penny loafers, worn by every second young bloke from Bondi to Fitzroy.

On its own, none of it is a crime. The problem is that they all look exactly like each other, and when it isn’t loafers it’s chunky, clumpy, genuinely ugly sneakers, and don’t get me started on those.

Young guys in New York dress to stand apart, while ours seem to be dressing to disappear into the crowd. The trick isn’t to chase whatever’s trending on TikTok this month, it’s to avoid looking like every other goose in big shorts, a short tee, white socks and penny loafers.

You don’t need to move to Brooklyn or drop five grand on a new wardrobe to dress better. You just need to put in about 10 per cent more effort than yesterday.

Start with your trousers, because going wider and higher in the waist changes your whole silhouette overnight. Put something with a bit of weight on your feet, add one layer you wouldn’t normally wear, a shirt jacket, an overshirt or a light knit, and finish with a hat or beanie that actually works with the outfit.

Lastly, buy something old. Find one piece with a story, whether it’s vintage, surplus or second-hand designer, and build an outfit around it rather than another logo.

New York’s real lesson is that great style isn’t about money or trends. It’s about bothering, and Australian men are long overdue to start.