Every man want to dress like in The Last of Us

Now that fashion month has come to an end, it is time to get our feet back on the ground. After seeing all the satin and leather dreams that the fashion world has managed to conjure up, however, the feeling remains that a wide gap has opened up between the catwalk and the street: on the one hand, we have the conceptual clothes of London, Milan, and Paris; on the other, the popularity of pages like @uniformdisplay, @vjintagemales, @advanced.research, and @attiresaint (not to mention the role of publications such as L'Etiquette) codified a new kind of look that seems to be all the rage today and made of jeans, leather jackets, boots, and generally practical and accessible pieces assembled with an eye for distressing. This fascination with practical menswear devoid of unnecessary sartorial and conceptual complications, the menswear of the great American outdoors, mixed with the planetary success of The Last of Us series has caused many to appreciate the utterly anonymous look of Pedro Pascal as the protagonist Joel. More: in recent weeks, a meme has been circulating online that gathers the male protagonists of numerous zombie apocalypse stories, including Brad Pitt in World War Z and Andrew Lincoln from The Walking Dead, under the caption «I'm afraid the zombie apocalypse will start and I won't have one of those shirts» referring to an olive green shirt with two pockets of vague military inspiration that recurs often in these movies or TV series. The trend multiplied afterward with Twitter users going to find the flannel shirts, Flint & Tinder jackets and boots worn by Pascal on the show, and even Bella Ramsay's t-shirts, pointing out among other things how teenagers also tend to wear the same shirts across movies, and shows. The question remains, however: how can one be exalted in front of a simple flannel shirt?

In 2022 and, in all likelihood, the rest of 2023, the role of TV costume designers have magnified considerably as every hit TV series carries some trend: from the black dresses of Wednesday to the ultra-luxe fashions of The White Lotus and Succession, from the Hellfire Club T-shirt of Stranger Things to the corsets of Bridgerton to the Vans of Squid Game to practically the entire costume and MUA department of Euphoria, if a TV series does not influence the buying habits of its viewers it has not been as iconic as its producers hoped. In this youthful, aspirational universe of somewhat dreamy but ill-fitting clothes for everyday life, there existed a void that The Last of Us went to fill: that of men who do not want to dress either like a billionaire corporate boss or like Nate Jacobs (i.e., without clothes) and who may have to bring their TV fantasies into contexts that do not allow them to wear Regency-style tailcoats or outfits worthy of the Targaryen family. It is therefore natural that in the face of a planetary hit series of the size of The Last of Us, the male audience saw in Pedro Pascal's apocalyptic wardrobe a role model with which to finally identify - an aspirational role that lends legitimacy and narrative depth to Fjällräven's everyday plaid flannel shirt or Flint & Tinder's very ordinary Trucker Jacket, to name two of the most common examples.

At this point, it is appropriate to take a step back and try to define the essence of this apocalyptic wardrobe that already the online public has begun to place in a precise category. The task is not difficult: the aesthetic is, as we said just now, that of the great American outdoors, the aesthetic of brands like Filson, Pendleton, or L.L. Bean, that of lumberjacks and modern cowboys made of denim, plaid shirts, boots and so on. There is, in this style, a reflective element: of note is the absence of modern or overly technical products. We will never see an Arc'teryx Shell Jacket in The Last of Us, to make a long story short, nor anything with even a remote futuristic look. The Last of Us, like The Walking Dead, is based on storytelling rooted in the Western genre, complete with guns and horses, small provincial towns with their saloons and church, and vast open spaces where the rules of civilization do not apply. It is a world without room for love or psychological intrigue, identity conflicts, or teenage angst- it is a paradoxically reassuring world, almost entirely removed from the feverish and polarized ideological conflicts that make today's pop cultural scene such a troubled and bleak heath. In this world where one survives amidst the vestiges of the present but devoid of technology and digital futurism, personal expression is stripped of modernity and harkens back to a cultural archetype associated with a time when social and gender roles were simplified and which, for a large portion of the audience, also represents a time that may be brutal but which is easier to navigate culturally.

Ultimately, these clothes remind us not so much of times but of less complicated geographical and cultural spaces and of a reality that can be read literally, by direct and transparent means. There is that anecdote about a student asking Sigmund Freud whether the cigar he loved to smoke represented a phallic symbol, to which the father of psychotherapy replied: «Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar». Perhaps the success of Pedro Pascal's flannels and jackets in The Last of Us reminds us of a time when clothes were simply clothes. In a world populated by zombies or mushroom-covered monsters, there is no room for fashion weeks.