I Where the Question Begins
A controversy erupted on Japanese social media over what came to be called the “middle-aged man in a hoodie problem.”
A commentator remarked that men approaching forty who still wear hoodies struck her as somehow off. The remark ignited an immediate firestorm. Defenders shot back: “People have the freedom to wear what they like.” Critics countered: “Dress your age. Have some dignity.” Both sides dug in.
Yet watching from the outside, I find both camps spinning their wheels on the same patch of ground.
The real question is not whether a hoodie suits a man in his forties. It is something far more fundamental: what is a man in his forties saying through his dress——or failing to say——at all?
II Dissecting “Uncool”
Before rushing to a verdict, we need to dissect the structure of the perception itself. Why does a middle-aged man in a hoodie read as uncool?
The first layer is a formal mismatch between body and garment. A hoodie’s hood is a structural element that works naturally on a young body with a defined jawline and upright posture. Set against the physical realities common in men past forty——a shorter neck, dropped shoulders, a forward tilt in the abdomen——the hood simply accumulates as surplus fabric at the back of the neck, making the entire silhouette read as heavy and shapeless.
The second layer is a collision of contexts. The hoodie originated in the worlds of sport, manual labor, and counter-culture——garments charged with an energy of refusal toward social institutions. That energy reads as authentic on someone who has not yet fully entered those institutions, someone still becoming. A man in his forties, however, is already deeply embedded in the structures of company, family, and community. When he puts on a hoodie, the anti-institutional charge of the garment crashes head-on into the thoroughly institutional weight of the wearer. This collision is what people are sensing when they call it “cringe.”
But the third layer is the most essential. It is the absence of intention in dress.
In most cases where a middle-aged man’s hoodie reads as uncool, the hoodie itself is not the problem. What is being perceived——and perceived clearly——is the absence of engagement: wearing the same thing today as yesterday, choosing by elimination (“it’s comfortable”), remaining unaware of one’s own body and context. This indifference toward dress is legible to others in its entirety.
III And Yet Young People Are the Same
Here we must stop and be honest.
“Inertia,” “elimination,” “unawareness” are not problems unique to the middle-aged man in a hoodie. The twenty-something who wears Uniqlo HeatTech, jogger pants, and Stan Smiths every single day is operating from the exact same structure.
So why is the young person forgiven?
Youth carries a kind of social margin. The unspoken understanding that someone is still becoming, still in the middle of figuring it out, allows even unaware dress to read as “searching.” No such margin is extended to the man in his forties; the same unawareness reads instead as resignation. The basis for criticism is not fashion at all——it is the imposition of social expectations tied to age.
And if we honestly dissect what “following trends” actually means for young people, its nature becomes clear. Balenciaga releases the Triple S. Select shops frame it with cultural context. Fashion media declares it this year’s trend. Zara produces a version. GU floods the market. The streets fill with it. Then it becomes “over.” The young person riding this current is structurally no different from the middle-aged man who keeps reaching for the same hoodie.
The difference is only the direction of the inertia. The middle-aged man is dragged by the past. The trend-follower is dragged by the current of marketing. In both cases, something outside the self is making the decision.
And most trend-following young people believe they chose the barrel-leg pants they bought at GU; believe their taste “developed” from scrolling the Instagram feeds of select shops; criticize the “out-of-touch older man” while remaining entirely unaware that they themselves are the most compliant consumers marketing could hope for. In terms of unawareness of one’s own exploitation, this is arguably the deeper problem.
IV The Intellectual Poverty of the Industry
Has the fashion industry confronted any of this?
The answer is unambiguous. It has not.
There is an enormous volume of fashion discourse aimed at people in their twenties. For people in their thirties, there are frameworks for the transitional moment——”smart casual,” “moving beyond streetwear.” For men in their forties, what exists amounts to: “wear your suit properly” and “stop trying to look young.” Almost nothing else.
This is not an accident. It is a structural failure of will.
The reason fashion marketing flows toward the young is straightforward. Young people have fluid identities and can easily be sold the self they want to become. Strong peer pressure makes them moveable through the fear of being left behind. No logic is required. Create the atmosphere, and the product sells.
Men in their forties are largely resistant to this pressure. To move them requires something more demanding: a clear argument for why this material, a concrete account of the value at this price, a vision of how this actually functions within the specific texture of their lives, a persuasive picture of how they will appear to others when they wear it.
This simply requires more from marketers and designers.
Japan’s menswear industry has never made a genuine effort to win the man in his forties as a customer. That abdication is one of the structural forces that keeps middle-aged men unaware. The responsibility lies not with the man in the hoodie but with the industry that abandoned him.
V A Borrowed Suit, a Lost Kimono
The root of the problem runs deeper still.
Menswear has long had a “completed answer” in the suit. Established in the nineteenth century, the suit achieved something close to a perfect system: concealing the body’s imperfections while simultaneously investing the wearer with social meaning. Its very perfection shut down subsequent designers’ thinking.
With the suit as the correct answer, designers have been left with only two moves: comply or rebel. A design language that genuinely engages with the body, context, and psychology of a man in his forties has simply never developed.
Women’s fashion, by contrast, never had an equivalent absolute answer. Corsets were refused. Chanel introduced jersey. Saint Laurent proposed the pantsuit. The design language has been continuously renewed through a sustained tension between the body, social norms, and aesthetic judgment. Having no correct answer meant being forced to keep questioning. Continued questioning expanded the vocabulary. An expanded vocabulary produced a language capable of speaking to the forty-year-old body and context.
Here lies a paradox: oppression generated richness; privilege generated poverty.
And layered onto this, for Japanese men specifically, is a problem all their own.
For Western men, the suit is something their own culture produced. Japanese men, by contrast, were forced by the Meiji Restoration’s violent cultural rupture to abandon the kimono——a design language native to their own bodies and aesthetic traditions——and import a system that others had already completed. They received a finished answer rather than working through the question themselves. And so they never developed the practice of questioning.
Japanese men inhabit a double alienation: the loss of the kimono as a native design language, and subjugation to the borrowed norm of the suit. To mock the “uncool older man” without awareness of this structure is to completely misread where the problem actually lies.
VI Naked After the Uniform Comes Off
Here the core of the hoodie problem comes into focus.
In the office where most men in their forties spend the majority of their year, the suit functions as a dress code that simply makes the decision for them. But the suit has one decisive characteristic: it comes off.
Young people are wrapped in the code of trend at all hours; there is no off-state. The moment the middle-aged man removes his suit, he falls into a condition of total uncodedness.
With the suit off, he has no sensitivity to trend, no cultivated personal aesthetic, no native design language from the kimono tradition, no practice of engaging with his own body. Nothing. And so he reaches for the hoodie.
The hoodie is the garment closest to nakedness. It operates by the logic of indoor clothing: it’s nearby, it’s comfortable, it requires no thought. This is not sloppiness. It is a structural inevitability: when the uniform comes off, there is nothing underneath.
The hoodie problem is not the question “what should he wear?” It is the question: “Who is he, once the official role is removed?”
VII Retirement as the Threshold
That question reaches far beyond the territory of fashion.
After retirement, many men encounter the same set of experiences: nowhere to go, no one to talk to, no sense of how to use time, no sense of who they are. On the surface these are described as problems of social isolation. But the root is deeper. The suit came off——and there was no self underneath.
The middle-aged man who reaches for the hoodie by habit is a preview of the man who will face complete emptiness after retirement.
Women, when they leave a job, tend to retain themselves. The reason is that women have always been required to hold multiple contexts of self-awareness simultaneously: the self at work, the self in society, the self in intimate relationships, the self living in a female body. These selves do not align; they contradict, create friction, interrogate each other. Through the accumulation of that friction, the question “who am I?” has never stopped being asked. Dress has been the daily practice of that question. The act of choosing what to wear today has always been directly connected to the question: “As what kind of person, and in what context, do I appear today?” And so when the professional context disappears, the self remains——held up by all the other contexts.
Men have placed nearly the whole of themselves inside the single, enormous context of the company. When that context disappears, the self disappears with it.
Japanese society has made one unrelenting demand of men: fulfill your role within the company. In exchange, it has offered a kind of exemption: you don’t need to think about anything else. That exemption was simultaneously a dispossession——the removal of every occasion to ask who one actually is.
The loneliness and loss of self that so many men experience after retirement is not a personal psychological weakness. It is the result of a social structure that has systematically taken “the self” away from men.
VIII Dress as a Practice of Self-Knowledge
The act of choosing each morning what to wear——consciously——is a practice that builds into daily life the following questions: What kind of context am I in today? How do I want to appear in the eyes of others? How do I engage with my own body today?
The difference in depth of self between someone who has sustained this practice for decades and someone who has simply deferred to the suit as the correct answer becomes dramatically apparent at the threshold of retirement.
A man who can say “I want to wear this”——who dresses from active desire rather than default——is more likely, in work, in relationships, in the way he moves through the world, to be capable of existing as a subject who can say: “This is how I want to live.” Agency in dress is practice in agency in life.
IX A Proposal: Dress as a Way of Living
So what is to be done?
This is not a conversation about what to buy. The question I want to put is more fundamental.
For a man to be able to say “I want to wear this” is not a fashion problem. It is a question of self. Do you know your own body? Do you know what kind of context you are living inside? Are you aware of how you appear in the eyes of others? Are you making choices from that awareness?
This is a genuinely active and intelligent practice. But it is not exceptional. It is simply a matter of making each morning’s choice a little more conscious.
When men acquire a language of dress, what changes? More men become capable of being aware of others’ eyes. More men become capable of putting their desires into words. More men remain themselves when the uniform comes off. And the possibility of genuine dialogue with women——through dress, through appearance in the shared world——begins to exist.
Fashion does not complete itself within menswear alone. It exists always in relation to womenswear, always in the space between. The current situation——in which women participate in the social space through the language of dress while men remain in that space without any such language——is not dialogue. It is monologue alongside silence.
When both bring their own language, and appear in the social space simultaneously, something genuinely new becomes possible: real co-creation, real resonance between the ways men and women present themselves to the world.
The middle-aged man in a hoodie was the entrance to all of this.
Not the hoodie that happens to be nearby. A way of dressing that is a way of living.
Which is also——at the most ordinary, daily level——an answer to the question: how do I want to live?
Jun Katanuma（潟沼 潤）
Simultaneous Interpreter & Translator / officenatura
Based in Kamakura. Wears kimono as everyday dress.