Steal The Look: The Performative Male

Style

Steal The Look: The Performative Male  

Wired earphones and an ice-cold oat milk matcha latte, feminist literature and a canvas tote — here’s how to become precisely the type of man everyone is desperate to avoid.

By Manfred Lu & Zene Yong

August 27, 2025

For a while now, wired earphones and an ice-cold oat milk matcha latte haven’t been mere lifestyle choices — they’ve become symbols of cultural superiority. Feminist literature signals sexual clarity; a canvas tote, sociopolitical awareness. You searched beyond fleeting trends, reaching for fragments that felt authentic, determined not to be like other men — only to end up as the very kind everyone now avoids.

The people we label as “cool” often begin with contrarianism before collapsing into cliché. That’s the paradox of crafting a personal brand: the aesthetics of your “ideal self” start to resemble an astrology chart — hyper-specific, until you realise suddenly everyone is a Capricorn. What once felt personal circles back into sameness. Shared style used to be a point of connection; now it’s a hierarchy. “Fake it ‘til you make it” was once aspirational, not deceitful. Today, different is pretentious: it doesn’t matter if anyone knows that album, you’re advertising that you do. The shade of green in your drink isn’t preference; it’s a billboard for your supposed “manipulative tendencies.” The more meticulously you define personal style, the less personal it becomes.

This is the new age of performativity that has the internet labelling this type of men the performative male. Of course T-shirts are better when they’re baby-sized, and glasses cooler when they alter nothing about your vision. Of course jorts are superior when they’re still as long as jeans, and EmRata’s book belongs in hand, not buried in your tote. If that last image made you flinch, this conversation is for you: the one who performs difference as an identity. Somewhere between jangling bag charms and carabiners, we decided that striving for specificity is the least original act of all. So why not embrace it?

Here, in defence of the “personalisation paradox,” and to all who are bound to keep performing, Men’s Folio presents a cheat sheet on how to become precisely the type of man everyone is desperate to avoid — the performative male.