I. An Afternoon of Quiet Unease
I walked into a fashionable cafe in Shibuya. Looking around, the women there — each in her own style — were almost without exception put-together, stylish. The way colors were combined, the way silhouettes were chosen, the way small accessories were used to finish a look — even when what they wore was a fast-fashion item, there was clearly an intention at work: the will to finish an outfit.
The men with them, though, told a different story. Loose, slouchy T-shirts, casual pants, sneakers with no thought given to how they fit the rest of the outfit. Mostly in their twenties. There was no malice in it, and it wasn’t a matter of money. It simply looked as if the very idea of “dressing” hadn’t occurred to them at all.
I was stunned. And then I realized this wasn’t unique to that Shibuya cafe. The salarymen on the commuter trains give off a similar air of resignation, regardless of age — outfits that look pulled straight off a Uniqlo shelf, combinations with no discernible logic, and, to be blunt, this extends to how they smell.
Forty years ago, when we were in our twenties, it felt different. Of course, not everyone was like that even then, and it’s possible this was just true of the people around me. Still, my gut sense is that there were far more young men back then who pored over fashion magazines cover to cover and pursued a style systematically — trad, ametra (American casual), DC brands, Shibuya-kei casual. Where did that intensity go?
II. What the Data Confirms: A Shift in Center of Gravity
This doesn’t seem to be mere nostalgia. Looking at several public surveys, interest in fashion has clearly shifted toward women over the past few decades. In one survey, every age bracket where more than 60% of respondents said they “pay attention to fashion” was a women’s bracket; even the highest-scoring men’s bracket (men in their sixties) came in at only around a quarter. In another survey, fewer than one in five men said they were interested in “clothing and fashion,” compared to nearly double that share among women. Usage rates for fashion- and beauty-related services were also higher among women across every category measured.
The same “retreat unique to men” shows up in how people relate to their own bodies. Japan’s Sports Agency has reported that the decline in exercise time and the rise in screen time (TV, computers, smartphones, tablets, game consoles) has been more pronounced among boys than girls. Weekly time spent on school sports clubs among junior high students has fallen for both sexes in recent years, but the drop has been steeper for boys. In clinical data on gaming disorder, the ratio of male to female patients is roughly eight to two, and being male is cited in the research itself as a risk factor.
Dressing well and physical training are, on the surface, separate domains. But the same pattern — a sharper “dropout” among men than women — shows up clearly in the numbers for both.
III. Why Is the Dropout Concentrated Among Men?
The Absence of Training Opportunities
Girls learn, from before they can even remember, that dressing is “something I get to handle myself.” Playing with dolls, playing dress-up, being dressed by mothers and other women around them. From adolescence onward, mutual evaluation within female peer groups, magazines, and social media sharpen that sensibility further.
Boys are never given this training infrastructure to begin with. What earns praise is “toughness” rather than “good looks,” and showing interest in one’s appearance risks being mocked as “narcissistic” or “girly.” This might be better described not as active “suppression” but simply as an absence of any opportunity for training in the first place.
Mutual Let-Off Among Peers
Peer pressure operates just as powerfully within male groups as within female groups. What differs is its direction and the height of the baseline it enforces.
Pressure within male groups runs almost entirely in one direction. A friend who takes care with his appearance becomes a target for teasing — “look who’s trying so hard.” By punishing anyone who breaks from the pack, the group levels itself down to a low common denominator. There is almost no corresponding pressure axis punishing someone for doing too little. The baseline is set low to begin with, and only rising above it draws punishment — a one-sided downward pressure.
Pressure within female groups, by contrast, runs in both directions. Making too little effort gets read as “not caring” or “not reading the room,” and one’s standing drops accordingly — an axis that barely exists within male groups. But standing out too much — “trying too hard,” “overdoing it,” “clearly angling for attention” — is also punished, less through direct teasing than through subtler means like being ignored or excluded. In other words, peer pressure within female groups functions as mutual surveillance within a narrow band, tolerating neither falling below it nor rising too far above it.
The resulting difference isn’t a difference in the strength of the pressure but in its structure. Because men’s baseline is low and there’s no incentive to move from it, the group as a whole sinks. Women’s band is narrow, but it’s set at a comparatively high position, and the constant fine-tuning it demands keeps the group as a whole pinned to a high standard.
Different Channels for Processing Anxiety
Economic and employment-related anxiety should, structurally, weigh more heavily on women. And yet the dropout shows up more strongly among men — which suggests the difference isn’t in the amount of anxiety but in the channel it flows into. Women have access to a socially sanctioned channel for sublimating anxiety and stress into “investing in oneself” — through appearance, fashion, self-improvement. Survey findings that describe fashion as a “source of energy and motivation” for women suggest this isn’t mere consumption but an active coping behavior aimed at restoring one’s sense of self-efficacy.
Men have no equivalent channel for converting anxiety into self-improvement. So instead of flowing into active self-betterment, that anxiety flows into passive escape — smartphones and games. This lines up with research pointing to escapism from work- or study-related stress as a factor underlying internet and gaming dependency.
The Weak Incentive Left by the Dating Market
Adding to this is how low the bar is set in the dating market. In an environment where clearing a minimal threshold — basic cleanliness — is often enough to be accepted, there’s little incentive to try harder than that. Where women remain under constant pressure to be seen — both by other women and by men — men’s external motivation to dress well is thin to begin with.
And this baseline seems to survive marriage intact. In one survey of a hundred married women, more than 70% said they could “tolerate” the now-notorious “dad’s uniform” — a plain white T-shirt, black shorts, a shoulder bag, and sandals — while only about 1% called it “stylish.” They tolerate it; they don’t expect anything more. The lowered expectations that formed during the dating market simply carry over, fixed in place, into marriage.
What’s striking is how much that tolerance depends on where the outfit is worn. Over 70% of the women were fine with it for a quick trip to the corner store or the local supermarket; that dropped to around 30% for a supermarket you drive to, and to a handful of percent for a school event. This is exactly the same logic as the “band pressure” within female peer groups — reading the room, adjusting to the occasion. In other words, wives apply that same situational sensibility not only to their own appearance but to their husbands’ — while husbands themselves never developed it in the first place. Hence the instinct to wear the same thing everywhere, regardless of occasion.
Also telling is how the husbands themselves describe the outfit — not as a compromise, but as “optimization.” It handles the heat, it’s easy to move in, it cuts down on decisions. Rather than framing the choice as an absence of the muscle for dressing well, they narrate it as a rational one. This is, in effect, the motivation-first model from Section V turned inside out: instead of using that vocabulary — efficiency, optimization — to climb back toward form, they use it to justify having stepped away from form in the first place.
IV. The Fork in the Road That Fast Fashion Reveals
The arrival of Uniqlo and GU made clothes that were affordable, presentable, and low-risk accessible to everyone. There’s a case to be made that this created a baseline from which anyone could put together a decent, tidy appearance. What’s interesting is that, using those same clothes, women keep layering on their own coordination and personal expression. The sense that “the material may be inexpensive, but finishing it is my own job” is still very much alive on the women’s side.
In other words, fast fashion itself isn’t the problem. The fork in the road lies between those who simply take the “safe default” that’s now open to everyone and stop there, and those who treat it as raw material to be worked with — and what determines which side someone falls on is, again, whether or not they built the “muscle for dressing well” in childhood.
V. An Age That Lost Its Form (型)
There may be a deeper structure underlying all of this. Physical discipline in the past — martial arts, tea ceremony, or the culture of school sports clubs — carried a shin-shin ichinyo (mind-body non-duality) logic: enter through form, and meaning follows. In the language of shushō-ittō (practice and enlightenment as one), you don’t wait to understand before you begin; beginning is itself already arrival. Dressing, too, was originally part of this kata (form). Putting on a kimono, handling practice clothes, tending to one’s appearance — these were drilled into the body as form, regardless of whether one felt motivated. Motivation came later, or was never the point; it grew naturally out of repeating the form.
Modern self-improvement discourse, though, is dominated almost entirely by a motivation-first model that enters through the mind and brain. Dopamine, reward systems, motivation, self-efficacy — the answer to “why don’t habits stick” is told almost exclusively in the vocabulary of brain science and psychology. Under this model, “getting motivated first” becomes a precondition for acting at all. Without that motivation already in place, one can’t even reach the starting line.
Under the old culture of form, you could simply enter the form regardless of whether you felt motivated. Walk into the dojo, and both your bearing and your appearance would be shaped automatically through repeated practice. Under today’s motivation-first model, though, “I’m not doing it because I don’t feel like it” becomes a fully legitimized way of doing nothing. We’ve already seen that men have little external incentive to dress well — a place to be evaluated, pressure from the dating market, a channel for turning anxiety into self-improvement. Now that form itself — an entry point that didn’t require motivation — has also been lost, that disadvantage runs deeper still.
For women, dressing has already been imprinted repeatedly since early childhood as a kind of form — through playing with dolls, through being dressed by their mothers — so it keeps running, to some degree automatically, regardless of motivation. Women, in other words, have unknowingly preserved a culture of form, while men have lost that culture of form altogether and, on top of that, been left behind by the motivation-first culture that was supposed to replace it. A double disadvantage.
VI. A Larger Story: Withdrawal from the Body Itself
Dressing well and physical training, at bottom, grow from the same root: handling one’s own body by one’s own will. Many young men are withdrawing from both.
Smartphones and games offer a sense of achievement and pleasure without spending the body at all. Both dressing and training are delayed-reward behaviors, whereas games are an immediate-reward device that pays out in seconds. For men with no place to be evaluated and no channel for self-improvement, a device that delivers recognition and pleasure without going through the body is simply too convenient.
Eat, sleep, play games, look at the phone, go to work. In this cycle there is barely a moment where the body is actively taken up as one’s own. Withdrawing from dressing well is just one entry point into that larger withdrawal.
VII. A Caveat
Of course, this isn’t true of all young men. Even among the generation that poured its passion into Shibuya-kei casual or DC brands, there were men with no interest in dressing well, and even now, among men in their twenties, there are some who genuinely pursue their own style. Even men who wear what looks like the same “dad’s uniform” sometimes keep their own quiet standards for the layers underneath or the sneakers they choose. The muscle for dressing well doesn’t necessarily disappear entirely — sometimes it just survives in a faint, residual form.
What I want to say here isn’t a generalization that “all young men are like this.” It’s that, compared to forty years ago, the side that doesn’t push against the norm — the side that grows up without ever building the muscle for dressing well — has clearly become the majority. That’s the shift in the center of gravity itself. What I saw at that Shibuya cafe, and what I see in salarymen’s outfits on the train, is, I think, a small but genuine glimpse of that shift made visible.