Is this the season of the hyper-optimized male? When Bryan Johnson, the 48-year-old longevity obsessive who spends $2 million a year trying to reverse his biological age, made his runway debut in Paris at Matières Fécales this week, it was the latest example in a string of looksmaxxing streamers, musclebound models, and biohacking tech bros at fashion week for Fall/Winter 2026.
As protein chic continues to peak, menswear silhouettes are skewing bulky. At Matières Fécales, Johnson appeared in a second-skin gray knit, designed to show off his defined muscles. Meanwhile, Demna’s first Gucci show featured T-shirts so tight that pecs and abs appeared like vacuum-packed chicken breasts (“Demna wants you to start Guccimaxxing,” wrote GQ). But behind the flexing of wealth and biceps is a shift in what masculinity means in the age of the algorithm.
It all began at New York Fashion Week. In what turned out to be the harbingser of the season, designer Elena Velez cast Braden Peters, the controversial poster boy for looksmaxxing, better known as ‘Clavicular’, to close her show. Peters, 20, who claims he’s used “bonesmashing” (aka hitting one’s face with a hammer) to improve facial structure and has taken crystal meth to stay lean, wore a silicon-soaked white shirt that Velez explains “referenced the Botox-like activity of synthetically freezing wrinkles in time”.
“I think his project [of looksmaxxing] comprises many unique and paradoxical points of interest, making him worthy of contemplation across disparate industries: performance art, tech, fashion, and beauty,” says the designer. When asked about the controversy of platforming the narcissistic figure, Velez was unbothered. “I’m not morally attached to the trends I consider within my work. For me, it’s about a more intricate tale of youthful nihilism in the algorithmic era. Men seem to feel disenfranchised these days and are looking for non-traditional ways to get a competitive edge in a deteriorating socioeconomic landscape.”
Why is this spike of manosphere-adjacent aesthetics happening now? And with evermore exaggerated expressions of fitness, wellness, and status hitting the runway, will it change how men want to look?
Revenge of the nerds
In a move that menswear podcast Throwing Fits dubbed “revenge of the nerds”, Mark Zuckerberg attended the Prada FW26 show in Milan, amid reports that Meta is scoping the Italian brand to collaborate on a luxury version of its AI-enabled smart glasses. Buff billionaire Jeff Bezos is another increasing presence in fashion, and attended Jonathan Anderson’s first couture show for Dior this year.
“Their attendance is about the evolution of luxury, as well as the intersection of fashion, technology and entertainment,” says Dr. Antonia Ward, chief futurist at trends intelligence agency Stylus. “It’s not a consumer trend, per se, but an industry trend about the luxury sector going where the money is.” Amid the ongoing luxury slowdown, in which the aspirational shopper pulls back spend, high fashion brands are increasingly courting the megarich — with tech bros being one of the most visible cohorts. Throwing Fits’s James Harris puts it more bluntly: “Powerful [men] buying their way into a spot at the cool kids table? Scandal.”
Looksmaxxers and tech bros make up different sides of the same coin when it comes to male optimization. Sitting somewhere between the two is the tech bro who wants to live forever. Johnson found himself on the runway in a show titled The 1%, which featured a line-up of looks poking fun at late-stage capitalism and extreme wealth.
It turned out the ‘lifemaxxer’ was in high demand: Velez had also tried to cast him in her show, but the timing didn’t work out. “He would have made a great addition to our cult of personalities on the runway this season, and I’m devastated [Matières Fécales] beat me to it,” she says.
Revised markers of status
Male optimization in 2026 is about finding new ways to mark yourself out. If you can’t be the richest or the hottest, maybe you can live the longest.
“Traditional markers of ‘doing well’ are increasingly invisible online, but how you look is immediately readable and rankable,” says Olivia Houghton, lead analyst for beauty, health and wellness at strategic foresight consultancy The Future Laboratory. “In a world where your social media presence is effectively your public self, appearance becomes a stand-in for all the other forms of status that feel inaccessible. Depth doesn’t perform as well as surface. So investment — of time, money, attention — flows toward what gets seen and validated.”
One of the most-shared looks from the season was at Gucci, where Gavin Weiss, a redheaded American football player, made his runway debut in a skin-tight polo shirt, walking with a macho swagger evocative of a Grand Theft Auto character. Weiss was part of a line-up of musclebound models almost bursting out of sheeny, tight clothes. “They looked less like traditional fashion bodies and more like the kind of controlled, optimized bodies you see circulating in tech, venture capital, and longevity culture,” observes Professor Andrew Groves, director of the Westminster menswear archive at the University of Westminster.
An exaggerated vision of masculinity was clearly on many designers’ minds. Biceps bulged out of sleeveless tailoring at Calvin Klein, while over at Haider Ackermann’s lust-charged Tom Ford show, models wore clear plastic raincoats over banker tailoring, evoking Patrick Bateman (something of a looksmaxxing blueprint) in American Psycho, who wears one to protect his suit from the blood spray of a killing spree.
Fashion has a history of aligning with exaggerated tropes of masculinity in unstable times. “You see it in the 1930s with Hollywood’s muscular male stars, the 1980s with power dressing and gym culture, and the 2000s with the metrosexual backlash and hyper-fit ‘alpha’ advertising,” says Groves. In 2014, Mark Simpson coined the term “spornosexual” to describe the emergence of a body type that rippled somewhere between sports player and porn star. Over a decade later, flamed by social media, the aesthetic has only become more extreme. “What is new now is the algorithm. It rewards visual signals that register instantly on-screen, and extreme physiques travel very well online.”
Murray Clark, senior style editor at GQ, sees the evolution as a natural consequence of this wider sense of cultural instability, and a reason we see it emerge in shows like Gucci. “Masculinity is in a state of flux right now. A lot of people are interrogating masculinity, or doubling down on their [own] masculinity,” says Clark. “And sometimes, that just means having big fucking muscles.”
“We are in a time when many consumers feel powerless about almost all aspects of their lives, but they can still feel like the CEO of their own body,” adds Ward.
New male optimization
As gym-sculpted bodies and self-optimization become more mainstream, brands are adapting, particularly in the mass market. Asos is investing in more men’s muscle-fit tops, with arrivals up 84% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, according to retail intelligence platform EDITED. “Sell-outs are also up on last year at retailers including Boohoo, Abercrombie & Fitch, and H&M, indicating demand with a younger, trend-led audience,” says senior retail analyst Krista Corrigan. And at Gucci, Demna told press that he saw the clothes as “consumer-oriented”, suggesting an intention to capture a newly bulked-up demographic.
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Brands are contending with a whole new vernacular around bodies, much of which is emerging from hyper-online looksmaxxing communities. Mogging — or dominating through a physically superior appearance — is not yet in the Oxford Dictionary, but we can assume it will be, along with an entire vernacular that pertains to how we look.
“‘Face card’ is a particularly interesting phrase in relation to this concept of ‘identity capital’. It likens beauty to a limitless credit card, implying a good face guarantees access, attention, and status,” says The Future Laboratory’s Houghton, adding that male consumers are drawn to looksmaxxing through fitness culture, discipline, and self-improvement narratives, with online communities built around these ideas.
Harris argues that muscly guys on the runway are not about the emergence of a new hypermasculine identity, however, but about fashion reflecting a certain aspect of male culture. “It’s more that the fashion industry is finding it easier to retain a semblance of relevancy by holding up a mirror to male identities that have developed in various subcultures — even ones born in the wormy digital underbelly — than explore and enable new male archetypes,” he says.
Will the proliferation of these looks create a narrower ideal for the male body? “Once a silhouette dominates the runway, it moves quickly through media and retail,” says Groves. “But menswear is also a system built for stability, so exaggerated signals rarely hold for long.” For brands, he adds, the key question is not whether hypermasculinity is good or bad, but what system it is stabilizing: status, authority, desirability, belonging. “Once you understand that, casting and silhouette become strategic rather than reactive.”
Though the emergence of controversial figures like Peters and Johnson may spark accusations of cynicism, some experts believe it signals a deeper and potentially more nuanced approach to male beauty, rather than a narrowing of ideals. “This all speaks to men paying more attention to — and spending more on — displaying identity through physicality. It’s such a huge opportunity for designers,” says Ward.
Some are already taking it. Velez, who has historically focused on womenswear, intends to launch menswear this fall. “I think there’s a masculine energy that has been repressed in the culture industry for some time now, which is becoming pressurized in different subcultural communities,” she says. “It’s highly combustible energy.”
The New Rules of Menswear Influencing for 2026
