The NYT makes note of a new trend – shirtless men in New York City:
“I was on my way to the bank and I saw not one, not two, but three guys” walking shirtless across Eighth Street, said Rob Morea, a personal trainer and an owner of Great Jones Fitness in NoHo. As might be expected of someone in his line of work, Mr. Morea's own physique resembles that of a bendable action figure. Despite that, he would never go shirtless in New York, he said. “It doesn't feel right. It's like going to a business meeting in your underwear.”
It is all a predictable part of the dressing-down of America, said Patricia Mears, deputy director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
“It's great we live in a democratic society, but we've lost all sense of decorum and occasion,” Ms. Mears said. “To be on Fifth Avenue is now about the same as being on the Coney Island boardwalk.”
To display your unclad torso on Fifth Avenue is also, she added, to give proof of the proposition that in the evolutionary arc of masculinity, men are no longer the oglers; they are the object of the gaze.
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