The Quiet Collapse of Everywhere Men Used to Shop

My grandfather bought every suit he ever owned from the same man. His name was Sol, he worked the second floor of a department store in downtown Cleveland, and over about thirty years he sold my grandfather maybe eleven suits, each one correct. Sol knew his measurements, obviously, but that was the least of it. He knew my grandfather's job, his synagogue, his opinion of his brother-in-law, the fact that he ran hot and hated wearing a coat over a jacket. When wide lapels came in, Sol split the difference rather than make a fifty-year-old accountant look like he was auditioning for something. That was the system. It wasn't romantic — it was infrastructure. A man walked into a building, a professional looked at him, and clothes came out the other end.

That infrastructure is now, more or less officially, gone. And because it died in pieces, spread across a couple dozen bankruptcy filings over a couple dozen news cycles, I don't think most men have clocked how total the collapse actually was. So let's do the arithmetic in one place.

The body count

Start the clock in July 2020, when Brooks Brothers filed for Chapter 11 after 202 years — the company that dressed Lincoln, that effectively invented American ready-to-wear, that put the button on the button-down. The obituaries blamed COVID, and COVID certainly signed the paperwork. But the filing itself told the truth: American offices had gone casual and fewer men were buying suits, a decade-long slide that predated anyone hearing the name of a Chinese city. Simon Property Group, its biggest landlord, sued over $8.7 million in unpaid rent while the lawyers argued about which century's business model had actually failed. COVID was the shove. The cliff had been there for years.

Then — and this is the part people miss — the online replacements started dying too, one per season, like a countdown.

Farfetch, the everything-store of designer fashion, a public company once valued in the tens of billions, went into liquidation in early 2024 and was rescued for parts by Coupang, a Korean e-commerce company, for $500 million — roughly a fortieth of its peak worth. MatchesFashion, its London rival, entered administration that same March; by midnight on June 30 the site simply went dark, 273 jobs gone with it. SSENSE — the Montreal retailer that basically invented how a generation of young men found designer clothing, the site whose grailed-out product photography became the visual language of an era — filed for creditor protection in August 2025, with about $499 million in liabilities against $387 million in assets, done in substantially by tariffs and the end of the de minimis shipping exemption. And in January 2026 came the big one: Saks Global — the combined Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman, merged only a year earlier in a $2.7 billion deal that was supposed to save all three — filed for Chapter 11 with a $1.75 billion financing package to limp through restructuring.

For the value tier, same story, different villain: Forever 21's US operator filed in March 2025 and closed all 354 American stores, and its bankruptcy declaration did something corporate filings almost never do — it named its killers. Shein and Temu, by name, and the duty-free direct-from-factory loophole they built empires on.

Look at the list as a list and the pattern jumps out. Different companies, different decades of founding, different price points — one shared function. Every one of them curated. A buyer somewhere had opinions, the store was the opinion made physical (or digital), and you could walk into the opinion and dress yourself inside it. That's what actually died in those filings. Not square footage. Curation as a service.

What killed it isn't what you think

The lazy version of this story says e-commerce killed retail, the way people say video killed the radio star — a vibe posing as a cause. But look at the corpses again: half of them are e-commerce. Farfetch, Matches, and SSENSE were the digital future. They died anyway, of the same disease as the limestone buildings.

The real killer is that aggregation without a point of view stopped being a business. Walk through the economics. The department store's fat margin paid for Sol — for expertise as overhead. The multi-brand e-tailer's margin paid for buyers, stylists, editorial shoots, the whole apparatus of taste. Both models depended on scarcity of access: for most of a century, the store was the only place the brands were, so the store could charge for the privilege and spend the profit on judgment.

Then every brand on earth opened its own site and started shipping worldwide. Marketplaces aggregated infinite selection at zero margin. Access went free — and when access goes free, the only survivors are whoever has the lowest price (Amazon, and the Shein/Temu machine that Forever 21's lawyers named) or a genuine point of view sold direct at full margin. The middlemen of taste got squeezed to death from both ends, including the digital ones. Especially the digital ones, since they never owned buildings they could sell on the way down.

And the industry knows the funerals aren't over. In McKinsey's State of Fashion 2026 — the annual survey that functions as the business's group therapy session — 46 percent of executives expect conditions to worsen this year, up from 39 percent last year. Forty percent named trade disruption a top-three risk, a number that jumped twenty-five points in one year. Nearly three-quarters plan to raise prices. Nobody in that survey is volunteering to rebuild the second floor and rehire Sol. The infrastructure isn't cyclically depressed. It's decommissioned.

The vacuum, at street level

So here's the practical situation for an ordinary guy in 2026 who'd like to dress a bit better, described without any industry abstraction.

The stores that used to decide for him: bankrupt. The multi-brand sites that replaced the stores: bankrupt. What's left is a brand website for every brand (each one a walled garden that sells only its own answer, with a model who is 6'1" and paid to look convinced), marketplaces with infinite shelf and zero opinion, and the algorithm — which does have an opinion, but its opinion is whatever this week's advertiser paid it to have.

Every man I know has built a workaround, and the workarounds are a census of the collapse. One outsources everything to his girlfriend, which works until it doesn't, and also — he'd say this himself — it's his outfit on someone else's taste. One buys exclusively from the single brand whose fit model happens to match his body, which works until he needs a category they don't make. One dresses entirely from a group chat, three friends adjudicating screenshots like a tiny volunteer Sol. And several have simply stopped: the 2019 wardrobe, maintained indefinitely, patched but never advanced, like a car you won't take to a mechanic because you don't know an honest one.

None of these men lack money. None of them lack interest — that's the thing; ask any of them about one category they care about, sneakers or watches or jackets, and you'll get twenty fluent minutes. What they lack is the infrastructure their fathers got for free with the price of the suit: somebody knowledgeable, on their side, with a memory.

What gets built in the crater

The collapse isn't reversing. Tariffs are pushing every price north, the executives are bracing rather than building, and no board on earth is going to approve re-staffing the menswear floor with salaried judgment. Whatever replaces the old infrastructure gets built new, and the candidates are already visible: creator feeds (taste, but rented by sponsors), the group chat (taste, but it doesn't scale past three friends), AI shopping assistants (scale, but most of them are commission machines wearing a smile), and some combination nobody's landed yet.

The interesting question of the next few years isn't whether men will get told what to wear again — somebody always ends up telling men what to wear; nature abhors that particular vacuum. The question is whether the next Sol works for the customer or for the commission.

My money, cautiously, is on the customer's side winning — for the simple reason that men can tell the difference, eventually, every time. It just takes them a bankruptcy or two.