The Runway's Redpill Problem
Words by Kate Hilditch
Edited by Rachel Hambly and Bailey Tolentino
If you haven’t noticed, the internet’s newest subculture is looksmaxxing. This includes everything from injecting peptides, smoking meth, or smashing one's own jaw. It’s important to note that this trend is solely followed by men. Though the aim of these tactics is to increase men’s ‘sexual market value’ or their overall sex-appeal to women, in reality, it comes off as suppressed homoeroticism. But is this trend really as new as the media and influencers make it out to be? Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, this trend was nowhere more prevalent than in Tom Ford’s objectification of the alpha male body. Ford put men in Gucci thongs and directed campaigns that promoted naturism, such as a YSL fragrance featuring nude Samuel de Cubber. The designer’s use of men felt ironic, sexy, and expansive. On runways across Paris and New York this month, designers turned toward the eerily sexless and extreme aspects of male vanity.
It’s time to introduce you to the star of this movement: Branden Peters, also known to most as Clavicular. The 20-year-old streamer closed down designer Elena Velez’s show (yes, the same Velez who had Anna Delevy walk her runway in her ankle monitor) at NYFW last month in a white button-up shirt designed with silicon to look permanently wet. Velez told Vogue in an interview that her goal was to tell a tale of “youthful nihilism in the algorithmic era.” What she means is casting those who have gained popularity by acting immorally in a commitment to look attractive, and in Clavicular’s case, spewing hate speech in the process.
Clavicular (Branden Peters) walking in Elena Velez’s Fall 2026 Ready-To-Wear collection.
The musician-model Pariah the Doll (Miles Shore) also appeared on Velz’s runway wearing a chin prosthetic that seemed to be poking fun at the jawbones coveted by the looksmaxxing community. A name even more familiar to readers, Liv Schmidt, an influencer and founder of an online weight-loss platform, also walked the show.
Clavicular and Pariah the Doll in their runway looks. (@pariahthedoll Instagram)
It’s been two decades since Tom Ford was at the helm of Gucci, and the label’s current creative director, Demna Gvasalia, has returned to the skintight, high-collared tees. Model’s stomachs were sucked in by the rigidity of their tops, reflecting a sort of statuesque dimension that looksmaxxers are craving. Gucci’s breakout star was a university-level football player, Gavin Weiss, whom Demna urged to be “more macho” in preparation for the show.
Gavin Weiss walking in Gucci’s FW26 show in New York
Diving into this world of incels, body dysmorphia, and patriarchal masculinity, I took it upon myself to watch Louis Theroux’s new documentary Inside the Manosphere. For an hour and a half (time I seriously wish I could get back), I watched young men in their early twenties working out, streaming, and spewing horrible antisemetic, racist, and homophobic rhetoric. Theroux travels from Miami to Marbella, exploring the group of men who, though not claimed by the looksmaxxers, are in tandem. When I see the men who walked this season’s runways and appeared in Inside the Manosphere, I’m reminded of some of the gay icons of the 1970s, like Peter Berlin, David Bowie, and Robert Mapplethorpe. These men possessed the era's unbelievable swag and often shared the maxxers' oversexualization, but they represented a movement with a positive effect. All those mentioned above helped transition queerness from a secret sect of society to a loud and proud one. This change doesn't seem possible in the case of our looksmaxxers; rather, the exact opposite.
Peter Berlin, photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1977. (Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation)
The fashion industry has always, in one form or another, been based on the promise that its products can bestow beauty and confidence on consumers. Where designers once fought to broaden society’s understanding of beauty, they are now drawn to a depiction of emptiness. This trend is humorous to most women, but really it's dangerous, and its coinciding with the growth of far-right political groups is not a coincidence.