The Vanishing Art of Male Seduction

Have men forgotten how to dress with sex appeal? A quick scroll through Instagram suggests otherwise, at least superficially. The torsos are sculpted, the compression shirts immaculate, the ribbed tanks fitted just so. Contemporary men have rarely looked more groomed, disciplined or aesthetically self-aware.

And yet, something feels conspicuously absent. The problem is not that men are no longer attractive. Many are, by any conventional measure, exceptionally so. The issue is that contemporary masculinity increasingly appears to follow the same invisible manual: the same body, the same grooming rituals, the same silhouettes, the same carefully managed signals of desirability. Everyone looks good and increasingly, everyone looks the same.

Sexiness, however, has historically depended on something far less controllable.

Vulnerability. Impulsiveness. Appetite. A degree of disorder. A quality that resists immediate explanation. The modern man, by contrast, appears almost too resolved.

When Perfection Stops Being Appealing

Image courtesy of American Psycho (2000), Lionsgate Films and Gucci

Patrick Bateman offers an unexpectedly useful reference point. In American Psycho, his obsessive fitness and grooming rituals were deliberately excessive: a pristine routine of exercise, skincare and self-surveillance that once appeared both hypermasculine and strangely transgressive. His regimen suggested the fantasy that if every external variable could be calibrated correctly, something internal might eventually fall into place.

Decades later, that fantasy has become considerably less fictional. Self-optimisation now sits at the centre of modern masculinity, yet it feels strangely flatter. Even the supposedly effortless is increasingly rehearsed. The transformation fantasy — becoming someone fascinating, enviable or larger than life — has been displaced by the language of maintenance: preventing decline, correcting imperfections and ensuring the finished product never slips.

Perhaps that is where desire begins to disappear. Sexiness was never simply validation, nor was perfection its natural endpoint. Seduction requires delay. It needs ambiguity, contradiction and something just off-centre enough to demand a second look.

Older ideas of menswear understood this instinctively. A loosened tie at three in the morning. A designer fragrance lingering on skin after an entire day. A leather jacket softened and battered by actual wear. These details were sensual precisely because they suggested something beyond the image. They hinted at private lives, questionable decisions and stories that had already happened.

Contemporary menswear, by comparison, often communicates desirability with almost total clarity. Everything is immediately visible. Everything has already been explained.

When Desirability Became a Metric

Few internet phenomena illustrate this shift more clearly than looksmaxxing. The term has been exhausted across podcasts, Discord servers, TikTok fitness content and YouTube essays dissecting facial symmetry for increasingly young audiences. Yet its endurance is revealing.

The more extreme practices associated with looksmaxxing — from obsessive facial measurements to so-called bone-smashing — may sit at the fringes, but the philosophy beneath them has moved considerably closer to the mainstream.

The premise is simple: desirability can be quantified. It applies to the face, jawline, posture, body-fat percentage, voice and wardrobe. Everything can apparently be assessed, diagnosed and improved.

Men have always been vain. Vanity itself is hardly new. What has changed is its emotional texture. Contemporary vanity increasingly feels less pleasurable than procedural, structured around endless evaluation rather than self-expression.

Online communities debate whether perceived flaws are “fixable” or whether genetics have already determined someone’s social prospects. Taken to its extreme, the language becomes bleakly deterministic. Fashion has not remained immune.

Perfect Bodies, Very Little Sex

Menswear has become intensely interested in the male body while appearing curiously detached from eroticism – and this distinction matters. The clothes certainly want attention. Bodies are tighter, harder and more visible. Recent seasons have brought sharper silhouettes, compression, exposed torsos and garments designed to emphasise physical conditioning.

Demna’s first collection for Gucci, which is titled ‘La Famiglia’. Images courtesy of Gucci and Catherine Opie.

Yet greater exposure has not necessarily produced greater sensuality. Instead, the body can begin to resemble a finished luxury product: sculpted, polished and protected from anything resembling recklessness.

Some hyper-built runway bodies now register less as sex symbols than extraordinarily expensive action figures — technically flawless, meticulously presented and strangely untouched by life. It recalls the argument made by writer RS Benedict in the essay Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny: contemporary culture has become increasingly skilled at perfecting bodies while simultaneously stripping them of sensuality.

The contradiction appears everywhere — superhero cinema, luxury advertising, fitness culture and social media. Perfect physiques proliferate, yet erotic life seems increasingly absent from the fantasy.

When Menswear Still Had an Appetite

The contrast becomes particularly apparent when looking back at Tom Ford’s Gucci of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Those men were hardly naturalistic. They were groomed, immaculate and unapologetically narcissistic. However, there was sweat in the fantasy.

There was humour, sleaze and a certain chemically enhanced impulsiveness. Silk shirts hung open against damp skin. Velvet tailoring looked as though it had survived a night out rather than arrived untouched from a showroom. The clothing implied events beyond the photograph.

Someone had left the club, stayed over or was about to make a poor decision after cigarettes and another drink. That suggestion was precisely the point.

Ford understood that eroticism was rarely about simply showing more skin. The most effective vulgarity did not announce itself immediately. It operated through implication: glazed skin, louche tailoring, a half-smirk, clothes moving around rather than vacuum-sealing the body. Appetite was part of the aesthetic.

Image courtesy of Frank Ockenfels/FX

Anthony Bourdain embodied a different version of the same quality. Crumpled shirts, silver rings, nicotine-marked fingers and a face visibly shaped by experience made him almost anomalous by today’s highly managed standards. His famously provocative observation — “If you don’t like sex, you can’t cook” — was ultimately less about either activity than appetite itself.

The appeal came from surrender: the willingness to experience something without constantly monitoring the optics of experiencing it. Bourdain dressed like a man whose body carried stories. Contemporary masculinity increasingly seems determined to avoid acquiring any.

Even Mess Has Become Curated

None of this means contemporary culture has abandoned disorder entirely. Fortunately, quite the opposite. Messiness has itself become an aesthetic category.

Sleaze can now be reproduced through moodboards, campaigns and highly considered branding. Charli XCX’s Brat era demonstrated the phenomenon particularly well: cigarettes, smudged mascara, chaos and hedonism became the ingredients of one of the most precisely engineered cultural images of its moment.

Fashion operates similarly. Demna’s Gucci inevitably invited comparisons with the Tom Ford era because many of the visual codes overlap. But the emotional register is markedly different.

Ford’s men appeared consumed by desire while Demna’s appear consumed by perception. There is often a heightened awareness of being observed — an understanding of oneself as image before person. It is fashion for an era in which individuals have learned to evaluate themselves through the same mechanisms as social media: angles, impressions, reactions and shareability.

Christina Dior Summer 2026 Show. Images courtesy of Christian Dior.

The resulting work can feel deliberately hollow even when its construction is intellectually sharp. At the more extreme end of online masculinity are personalities such as Clavicular, less significant as universally desirable male ideals than as products of deeply online self-optimisation culture.

Their relevance lies in what they reveal. The body becomes almost over-rendered: scrutinised so intensely, refined so aggressively and observed through the front-facing camera for so long that spontaneity struggles to survive.

Sexiness is displaced by optimisation.

When Luxury and Looksmaxxing Begin to Converge

At Versace under Dario Vitale, this relationship with the body becomes even more explicit. Skin-tight silhouettes, sculpted torsos and shirts designed to cling rather than drape create clothing that expects the wearer to arrive physically prepared. The body is not merely wearing the garment; it has been engineered to support it. The result can look excellent.

Indeed, the hyper-disciplined gym devotee — fully committed to peptides, Bulgarian split squats and physical optimisation — may be ideally equipped for such clothes. That is precisely what makes the convergence interesting.

The visual language of luxury menswear and the visual language of internet masculinity are beginning to overlap. Both can privilege definition, control, perfection and intense bodily awareness. What risks disappearing in the process is mystery.

Nothing Is Allowed to Stay Unseen

The fundamental problem with modern masculinity may ultimately be that too little remains private. The workout programme becomes a carousel, the diet a template and the skincare routine evidence of discipline. Every outfit is photographed, tagged and analysed. The body becomes both project and portfolio.

There is consequently very little room left for myth. Sexiness requires opacity, while a degree of disorder helps too.

A person has to feel like a person rather than a meticulously assembled brand deck equipped with abdominal muscles. Men have not suddenly become less attractive. Nor are they dressing badly. Quite the opposite: many contemporary men arguably look better than ever. Yet they also appear painfully aware of being watched.

At the same time, awareness changes the fantasy. Once the strategy becomes visible, seduction begins to resemble performance. Once every element is optimised, desire loses the gaps into which imagination once entered.

Nothing simply happens anymore. Perhaps the sexy man did not disappear because masculinity stopped caring about beauty, but because masculinity started caring about it far too much.

This article was first seen on Men’s Folio Singapore.

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