At Auralee's menswear show this past June, collars were top of mind. They were also top of blazer, jacket, sweater, trench coat, and just about every other layer the Japanese label sent trotting down the runway.
Of the 40-odd outfits designer Ryota Iwai showed in Paris, 17 of them – over a third! – featured shirts whose collars pointed any way but down, often with one end conspicuously folded over their outermost layer.
Once I started seeing the flyaway collars, they were hard to miss. Last winter, Simone Bellotti's second collection for Jil Sander was so lousy with them I stopped counting after the fifth or so model materialised on my laptop screen, one end of his white shirt collar neatly folded over a svelte grey three-button suit. A few months later, Michael Rider's debut menswear collection at Celine picked up right where Bellotti left off, half-tucked collars and all.
Those collections were hardly outliers. Across the runways this past year, peekaboo collars abounded, jauntily protruding over every layer imaginable: shaggy V-neck sweaters and fluttery mac coats; scuzzy scoop-neck vests and flecked blazers; airy striped tees and swishy Harrington jackets.
The flyaway collar is a flourish long employed by a specific type of forum-roving menswear fan. (You could Google “sprezzatura”, or you could spare yourself and trust me on this one.) These days, though, the ploy is no longer the remit of guys who geek out on pick stitching – or even indie fashion-week darlings lauded for their idiosyncratic styling.
Take Connor Storrie's recent Saint Laurent campaign, which includes a video snippet of the Heated Rivalry hunk, shot from the shoulders up, bopping along to Milli Vanilli in a shirt whose collar tilts gravity-defyingly upwards. In images from the same shoot, Storrie models a bicep-hugging crewneck sweater and a butch leather jacket, the collar of his striped button-up yanked askew like it was just body-checked into the glass.
These are not the brash, haughtily popped collars of a Bruce Weber-era Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue. They're a more self-conscious affectation, a winking signifier that endeavours to telegraph a careless, “this old thing?” energy. (I get the allure. The collar on this £780 Phoebe Philo shirt – cut to remain in a state of half up, half down homeostasis – is so ingenious, it almost makes you forgive the price.)
What, exactly, do these independent-minded collars say about the state of getting dressed right now? If I had to hazard a guess, they have a lot to do with the wretched, relentless pursuit of “personal style”, that reliable albatross of the extremely online fashion crowd. No outfit looks quite right unless it's ever-so-slightly wrong, designers like Bellotti and Rider seem to be suggesting, whether it's a collar end left exposed or a shirt sleeve left flapping in the wind. That the once-anonymous stylists who help articulate those ideas on the runway are now superstars in their own right is no coincidence.
It's too harsh to call the flyaway collar irredeemably contrived, and too much of a stretch to call it 2026's answer to the Ralph Tuck. But its weird ubiquity points to a fundamental irony in the trend-flattening age of the internet: If everybody employs the same handful of styling quirks to communicate their sui generis swag, how personal can their style really be?
Rushing to work last week, I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a parked car. My shirt collar was losing a battle with the wind, and one end had flopped lazily over the lapel of my suit. It looked cool. It looked right. I tucked it back where it belonged.