By Reginald Jerome de Mans*

I wore a pair of Gurkha trousers the other day. Those wide-waistbanded eccentricities that looked so dashing on friends’ fit posts, their criss-crossing straps so gloriously inconvenient, they put me in mind of the old sowing/reaping meme:

“Me wearing Ghurka pants: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! Me having to undo and redo them to use the bathroom: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.”

They also put me in mind of forum groupthink, the phenomenon of micro-trends adopted by readers of discussion forums, inspired by the reigning discourse there. Today it seems as quaint and bygone as the autocorrect-testing archaicism fora that I persisted in using. 

Various amusing artifacts in my wardrobe testify to the persistence of that lost time, aside from ghurka trousers. But are they all I have to show for hundreds of wasted hours?

Early 2000s time-wasters, often young professionals or students, discovered that every possible subculture had its own Petri dish on the internet in those fora. What made them subcultures rather than cultures or hobbies? An embarrassment to publicly acknowledge interest in them, for one thing. 

A forum allowed virtual participation – anonymous behind a silly username – and men around the world came together for community, to share knowledge and experience, to the extent we had any to add to the written sources (Flusser and Roetzel primarily, and the occasional unreliable magazine article). 

What resulted was by no means idyllic or healthy, but it did create community: one shared interest allowing men to discuss anything. The handful who came to lead the discourse then attracted followers who emulated them, creating norms. 

Leading the discourse merely required speaking with a little authority, at least until it came time to put up evidence – experience with a given tailor or maker, with a given city’s offerings, or posting a fit pic. The rest of us had to clear our minds of the few ideas we had otherwise received.

What filled our minds, along with silly in-jokes (like the loopy early poster who claimed there were transparent metal collar stays) was the coalescence of certain preferences and standards, based on what a handful of posters who set the tone found themselves aligning on. And those preferences defined by groupthink became their own recognisable characteristics, their own in-jokes in a way.

Once forum heads had swept aside what we thought we knew, one of the most salient tropes they filled ours with was an overarching preference for British makers. 

Of course, gatekeeping and judgmentalness would accept nothing but the best, so these couldn’t be any British shoes, but Edward Green in particular, preferred for some reason a hair more than the ready-to-wear of John Lobb Paris.

Green’s model names (particularly the infamous Dover, the exemplar of Green’s signature expertise of invisibly skin-stitching with a boar’s bristle) became as well known to many of us as the calendar of saints. Even I succumbed eventually to the Dover, buying a two-tone version that I eventually came to my senses about and sold off. 

As forum members love bargains almost as much as showing each other up, they even attempted parallel importation of these shoes, from international retailers who promised the lowest prices. 

My most group-thought Green order was the Windsor, a heavily brogued derby whose peculiarity (in addition to having a thistle punched in the side) was that instead of having a wingtip or cap toe, it had a U-shaped tip.

It had earlier been the group order of the secretive London Lounge, a forum with restricted membership, and they specified it had to be made up on an old Edward Green last, the gently squared ‘great 88’ (since superseded by multiple generations of lasts refining the shape – the 808, Ralph Lauren’s 89, the 888 and so on). 

Groupthink from a different forum led me to order the shoe in cordovan. I then succumbed to the online talk about deer bones, and wasted countless hours trying to rub the damn things with one. Over time I learned that cordovan is extremely heavy, wears very hot, doesn’t take polish the way normal leather shoes do… and that deer bones can stay in roadkill. 

The mumbo-jumbo about rubbing them on hides for their supposed magic oils is worthless, except if one is polishing certain waxy leathers. And, a confession I can’t believe I’m making, I bought an oriental rug just to be able to photograph my new shoes on one the way other forum members did… 

Groupthink also spurred me to another purchase outside of my usual taste, longwings, whose wing tip extends all the way to the back of the shoe. Although ordering them from Green pitted one groupthink against another, since they were neither from Alden nor in cordovan (the classic maker and material). 

I generally managed to avoid most of the Americana species of groupthink, including obsessiveness over the perfect oxford cloth button-down shirting, collar roll and generosity of fit.

The American Trad look and its ethos took a very defined shape among a deeply felt subpopulation in the mid-2000s, taking an odd turn in 2009 when a large number of genuine Harris Tweed sports coats ended up at the Boston branch of the discounter Primark, following a disastrous decision by the main Harris Tweed buyer to reduce the innumerable patterns Harris Tweed was woven in down to five. Members of one forum took to buying and returning the sports coats in order to keep the Harris Tweed-branded hangers they came on. 

I did succumb to one trope of Trad, ordering a suit with the 3-roll-2 buttoning point they so loved. Never one to comply with every detail of a given norm, I had a British tailor make it (on reflection, the Trads seemed to favor British cloth but not British make, except for the Shaggy Dog sweaters that old Drumohr used to knit). The result was not great, however, resembling a normal two-button jacket with a nearly invisible vestigial third… 

On the same suit I demanded my tailor incorporate a bit of Gallic delusion, the cran parisien (or fish mouth) lapel notch. And this is where we get into the French flavour of groupthink. 

The cran parisien I wanted came from a catalogue by Arnys, and any mention of Arnys on the fora could not avoid touching on its house specialty, the Forestière work jacket. As happens so often, my illusions were dashed actually trying one on – I found it baggy and unflattering – but I did buy a few of their ridiculous crumply seven-fold cravates d’atelier with hand-rolled edges. 

I confess I contributed to the mythos by sharing what I knew of Arnys and other Paris makers in the salad days of the fora (and, dare I say it, in the book I wrote several years ago, Swan Songs).

In those days, wearing a handkerchief of any kind, let alone a fancy printed pocket square, was a rare bit of foppery, and I led the chase for twee little medieval-printed ones Drake’s had made at one time for Holland & Holland.

Then another member showed me that the Paris branch of Hilditch & Key once made a specialty of issuing similar prints on cashmere, rather than the silk or wool that Drake’s used. That particular revelation became one of many rabbit holes I led fellow forum members down. 

I remember the day French weaver Simonnot-Godard’s cotton handkerchieves became a sensation. One spring day in 2007 the late shirtmaker Alexander Kabbaz mentioned  stocking them, and the next moment they seemed to be everywhere, these extremely fine, fancy handkerchieves that turned out to be the house cotton handkerchieves of Charvet and Hermès…

The forum pièce de résistance was a Simonnot-Godard piece whose quadrants were different types of Madras plaid, so the wearer could at any time have one of four ugly patterns sticking out of their breast pocket. I admit buying it and ultimately passing it on, but I’ve kept (and continue to acquire more colourways of) their beautiful fine cotton handkerchieves in solid pastel colours. 

The key, I think, is to gain enough confidence to reject some of the items thrust upon us, and figure out what we actually want. I never did buy SG’s much-vaunted chambray shirting cloth, although Kabbaz did get me to try Zendaline from the remaining stocks at Charvet based on his old guide to different kinds of shirt cloths.

Otherwise, forum-approved cloths were generally British, with the flashy luxury cloth houses like Dormeuil, Scabal and Loro Piana derided as overpriced and often flimsy. Inverted snobbery likely had a hand as well. 

In any case, the flight to British safety stayed with me for most of my time ordering custom tailoring. I succumbed to try forum-favourite fresco cloth, one of the various weaves that supposedly makes a suit easier to wear in hot weather (in the end, both the heat and the ease have to be relative)… 

In 2008, I joined a rush of online friends buying lengths of cloth from J&J Minnis before its acquisition, out of an atavistic dread that whatever the new Minnis would produce would be lacking.

I had all of mine made up in forum-approved drape-cut suits, one a double-breasted with the 4×1 ‘Kent’ keystone buttoning point, so named for the Duke of Kent, who made his elder brother the Duke of Windsor seem responsible and balanced. The forum tumult about the drape cut and its exponents in Savile Row bore out Anderson & Sheppard’s old saying that some swore by them, some swore at them.

What did groupthink mean? A safety of correctness, a secret signal broadcast only on the internet of shared taste. Many of us needed that correctness, after having our own ideas about clothing and confidence in taste razed when we joined. 

We eventually relearned confidence in our own taste – to find our own truths, whether before or after moving out of the orbit of the fora thanks to job changes, the demands of spouses and family, or simply maturity. 

Today, social media is the most powerful generator of groupthink, but it is different. The fora were participatory: even if not egalitarian – certain members’ opinions were valued much more highly – opinions were based on the tastes of a dynamically changing group, unlike social media authorities who simply impart their knowledge to an audience. 

From my account above, it may seem that what I have left are just some artifacts and phantoms, memories of inane discussions that helped pass the time. But some preferences have stood the test of time. I just took delivery of my umpteenth pair of Greens, for example, a remake of their bit loafer the Millfield, although I no longer post for imagined clout the way I used to. 

I also wear my old Minnis-cloth suits frequently (usually with a Simonnot-Godard handkerchief discreetly in the breast pocket) and love their cloth, even as I’ve been quite happy with the product of the new Minnis as well, having one of my most recent suits made up in a Prince of Wales check flannel from their current line.  

Looking back, my forum days support a broader lesson I’ve learned: welcome knowledge, but consider the source, and the context it’s presented in.

There have been times in real life that I’ve had to unlearn what I thought I knew, in order to relearn something from foundational principles back up. It’s been important, however, to reach a critical mass of knowledge that will allow me to rely on my own judgment.

The fleeting exchanges I had on fora led to some real friendships, because looking back I realise I wasn’t just seeking knowledge, but a sense of community too at an isolated time of my life. 

Certain connections, on group chats or in real life, have become steadfast friends, some few constants of reliable and regular contact, where we exchange about more than clothing, as before, but without the weight of carrying someone else’s preferences.

Like on the fora back in the day, our own clothing and style quirks often come in for everyone else’s good-natured derision. Unlike back then, all of us now have the confidence in our own preferences to laugh it off and move on. 

*The pen name for the author, a PS reader and frequent forum contributor