Usually when I post a photo of a man, the comments either criticize how A) boring or B) crazy/outlandish he looks. I am starting to feel like I can’t win. And by extension, that men can’t win at fashion.

I present to you this photo of Ian, whose photo I originally didn’t post because the shots are slightly out of focus. I took this photo the first day I ever took my Canon 60D out, so that’s a cool piece of random trivia. Ian looked good enough for me to photograph him though. Admittedly I still don’t entirely comprehend male fashion – and what good men’s fashion looks like – and therefore I offer Ian’s picture as a sort of mea culpa.

My favorite male fashion bloggers’ outfits look nothing like the designs worn on men who walk the catwalks at the men’s RTW collections. It’s more like there’s a standard American guys’ look, and the only thing that changes from season-to-season are the proportions and color, and even then only slightly. That’s what confuses me. Women aspire to look like the supermodels on the runway, but it doesn’t seem to work that way with guys. I never see young fashionable guys in Chicago rocking skirts (a la Rick Owens) or pastel-on-pastel (a la Versace). In contrast, you can quite clearly see the trickle-down effect that the designer collections have on womenswear all the way from Barneys to Forever21. I’m never going to get men’s fashion so I’m just going to let my readers (and your comments) guide my understanding.