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 harbinger 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.”
