“Pluribus Unum”—“Out of many, one.” The phrase, carved in solemn serif letters outside New York City’s Midtown Tunnel, is an emblem of national unity. I glimpsed it through the backseat window of a cab, shimmering under the weight of a humid summer haze. The letters looked warped, flickering in and out like a mirage. In that moment, the phrase’s reversal came back to me: “E Unibus Pluram”—the title of an essay by David Foster Wallace written in 1993. It was a meditation on irony, television, and the cultural flattening of American identity. Three decades later, its concerns echo not in books or sitcoms, but in fashion.
Wallace’s essay, whose Latin-inverted title means “out of one, many,” marked a turning point in postmodern cultural critique. In it, Wallace lamented how the rise of self-referential irony—especially in television—had rendered any sincere expression embarrassing. To be earnest was to be uncool; to feel deeply was to be naive. Wallace envisioned a new kind of artist: not the arch ironist, but the rebel willing to risk sincerity. Someone brave enough to risk a yawn, an eye-roll, or a smirk in order to reach something true. Thirty years on, this idea—of “new sincerity”—has come to life not only in literature or cinema but in the way people dress.
Fashion has long been the language of status, fantasy, and aspiration. But in the last two decades, it has undergone a seismic transformation. We’ve witnessed a shift from aloofness to emotion, from perfection to imperfection, from the elitist to the accessible. Compare Tom Ford’s Gucci—slick, hypersexual, impossibly tailored—with Alessandro Michele’s Gucci, where grandma glasses, crocheted cardigans, and antique jewelry abound. Or take Nicolas Ghesquière’s cool, futuristic Balenciaga and contrast it with Demna’s dad sneakers, oversized hoodies, and normcore silhouettes. What we’re seeing isn’t just a stylistic shift; it’s a philosophical one. One that maps almost directly onto Wallace’s cultural forecast of post-irony and the rise of the emotionally committed creative.
In the era Wallace wrote about, television had turned irony into currency. Viewers were trained to consume media with a wink and a nudge—to spot the joke before the punchline, to perform distance rather than emotion. Today, that role belongs to the algorithm. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok churn out content tailored to provoke engagement—be it awe, envy, or derision. Within this attention economy, even sincerity becomes a kind of performance. A crying selfie, an “authentic” OOTD, a #mentalhealthawareness post—it’s all filtered through layers of self-awareness and soft branding.
Fashion, too, plays this game. Demna’s Balenciaga shows, filled with tattered tees and padded shoulders, can feel like satire. But satire of what? The fashion industry? Consumerism? Taste itself? And yet, these seemingly ironic gestures often produce the most gut-level reactions. We laugh, then we look again. And sometimes, we feel. That ambiguity is where the new sincerity lives: not in naive earnestness, but in deliberate, layered emotional construction.
Take Glenn Martens’ Fall 2025 couture debut for Maison Margiela. Expectations were high: Would he pay homage to the label’s elusive founder, Martin Margiela, or chart a radically new path? Instead, he did something far more interesting: he layered references within references, borrowing from the house’s DNA—like its iconic masks—but reconfiguring them not to hide the wearer, but to intensify their presence. These were not anonymous masks. They were sincere ones. They declared heritage while embodying transformation. They didn’t shield emotion—they projected it.
Wallace feared that mass reproduction would flatten meaning—that constant cultural referencing would render originality impossible. And yet, designers like Martens prove the opposite. Referencing is no longer a dilution of meaning; it’s a scaffolding for it. The crushed metallic textures, oxidized finishes, and intentionally distorted silhouettes in his collection weren’t just aesthetic choices. They were signals—emotional, historical, and conceptual. They reminded viewers that even artificiality can be a vessel for authenticity.
In today’s fashion, we’re witnessing a shift from the elite and unattainable to the hyperattainable. Power suits and sharp stilettos have been replaced by orthopedic sneakers, pajama-inspired tailoring, and knitwear reminiscent of hand-me-downs. In this new language of style, sincerity is not hidden—it’s exaggerated. It’s embedded in the geeky eyeglass chains, the asymmetric sweaters, the childlike accessories. These garments don’t just replicate reality; they amplify the emotional truth of it.
This isn’t irony. This is play. And play, when done with intent, can be deeply sincere. That’s the paradox of the current fashion moment: artifice, if transparent enough, becomes honesty. What Wallace called for—a new generation of rebels willing to “risk the yawn”—has found fertile ground on the runway.
Prada’s Spring/Summer 2026 menswear collection offers another poignant example. Co-designed by Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada, it explored masculinity not through rigidity, but softness—gauzy knits, adolescent silhouettes, and a color palette of washed-out pastels. Their version of the modern man isn’t armored in formality but enveloped in fragility. In their hands, menswear becomes a tool to dismantle rather than enforce archetypes. Emotional vulnerability is no longer hidden beneath tailoring—it becomes the tailoring.
Jonathan Anderson’s debut for Dior menswear echoed this tendency toward emotional density. His use of 1950s silhouettes, bejeweled pins, and delicate embroidery didn’t signal nostalgia as much as narrative. It was an earnest appeal to fashion’s archival past, not to revive it, but to reconstruct it with sensitivity. Wales Bonner’s “Jewel” collection did something similar. Through embellishment, fabric, and silhouette, she communicated history—not just personal, but racial and cultural—suggesting that fashion is a space where memory is wearable.
This commitment to emotion over spectacle is also visible in the rise of fashion that centers imperfection and sustainability. Designers like Marine Serre work with upcycled materials—old tablecloths, scarves, and repurposed workwear—not for novelty, but as a statement. Fashion, they suggest, need not be about endless production but about emotional preservation. To wear something old is not to be behind the trend; it is to be ahead of the crisis. And in a world increasingly conscious of environmental collapse, there is a deep sincerity in choosing design that remembers, that conserves, that refuses to forget.
Even so, sincerity in the age of algorithms is a risky game. The moment something authentic is posted online, it becomes content. The blurry, “unfiltered” mirror selfie, the unpolished outfit video, the handwritten notes pinned to jackets—they can all be consumed as aesthetic gestures. What began as a personal moment is transformed into a visual brand. This is the dilemma Wallace foresaw. If everything is a performance, can anything remain sincere?
Yet perhaps this is the wrong question. Perhaps sincerity, like fashion itself, has evolved. It is no longer about stripping away all artifice. It is about owning the artifice. Today’s most compelling designers understand that truth doesn’t always come dressed in minimalism. Sometimes, it arrives in a mask. Sometimes, in a rhinestone brooch. Sometimes, in a thrifted T-shirt with uneven hems. What matters is not the purity of the medium, but the intent behind it.
In this light, Wallace’s anxiety over “E Unibus Pluram”—the idea that a single cultural identity might dissolve into a chaotic multiplicity—can be reframed. What if plurality isn’t the death of meaning but its rebirth? What if fashion’s many voices, many references, many contradictions are not a threat to coherence but a new kind of sincerity—a fragmented, polyphonic sincerity that reflects the disjointedness of modern life?
In a way, we’re all designers now. With every outfit posted, every look curated, every identity performed online, we participate in a cultural relay. We don’t just consume fashion; we co-author it. Our clothing becomes not just a mirror of self but a site of shared narrative. We are no longer dressing just for ourselves, or for the gaze of others—but for a community of reference. A collective archive.
This is where Wallace’s vision finds unexpected fulfillment. The rebel he imagined—the one willing to be laughed at, to be dismissed, to be misunderstood—is everywhere now. They are in the ones who dress “too much” or “not enough,” who wear their hearts in the form of color palettes and fabric choices. They are in the designers resurrecting the past not to capitalize on nostalgia but to engage in cultural reckoning. They are in the wearers, too—in everyone who chooses clothes not for status, but for meaning.
We may never return to a time when fashion was seen as the opposite of emotion—where to care about clothes was to be shallow. Today, to care about clothes is to care about identity, history, politics, sustainability, gender, memory. It is to care about the stories we tell with our bodies.
Wallace feared that too much referencing would make meaning impossible. But today’s designers—and wearers—are proving him partially wrong. Meaning is still possible. It’s just harder now. It takes more care, more intention, more risk. But when it lands—when a look feels right, when it resonates, when it tells a story—we recognize it instantly. That’s sincerity. Not the absence of construction, but the emotional truth within the construction.
In the end, maybe that’s what fashion teaches us better than any essay or novel can: that truth is not a matter of stripping away the layers, but of knowing which ones to keep.