Last fall, Sunny Bali posted a video on TikTok that briefly mentioned the crewneck cardigan. Bali dispenses men’s style advice from a female POV to her 73,000 followers, and was a little nonplussed by the ardor and focus of their attention. “I don’t think I have ever had so many comments and DMs asking where to get an article of clothing,” she says. “They seemed genuinely curious about this ‘new’ style of cardigan.”
New York-based influencer Paris Booker started noticing crewneck cardigans around the same time, on fellow creators and in the lookbooks of streetwear-adjacent brands like Noah. “After I saw it styled a few times, I decided to challenge myself,” he says, so he bought one from Octobre Éditions, the brother label of French-cool-girl brand Sézane. Booker was already a cardigan enthusiast, drawn to items that allow for dramatic layering. The crewneck cardigan “seemed like the perfect piece to try out.”
Booker and Bali aren’t alone. Over the last few months, chronically-online fashion buffs have clocked an uptick in friendly riffs on the classic V-front cardigan, a de facto layering piece for guys and gals alike. Menswear tends to move in small, incremental nudges, but this particular sweater proliferated quickly and widely; soon enough, brands from Auralee to ASOS were selling them.
“The crewneck cardigan feels slightly more elevated than the V-cut,” Booker says. “It’s a bolder choice, especially for a younger guy who’s into fashion.” Part of its appeal, he notes, is that frequent lodestar of the haggard fashion editor or canny store associate: versatility. Booker is just as likely to wear one with a T-shirt and jeans as he is a button-up, tie, and loafers.
Trends are notoriously tricky to trace back to a single source, but patient zero of the crewneck cardigan craze might be Miuccia Prada. For Miu Miu’s fall 2023 show, the designer sent models down the runway in prim crewneck sweaters worn beneath matching crewneck cardigans—a wry skewering of the archetypical ‘50s-era secretary, an arched brow at mid-century propriety, and a tongue-in-cheek admonishment of office dress codes. Suddenly, the dainty clerical standby looked remarkably modern again.
It helps, of course, that Miu Miu’s collection hit the catwalk while the Agnès b. snap cardigan—a longstanding stalwart of the genre, and a newfound favorite of the Dimes Square crowd—was enjoying a resurgence of its own. In 2020, Emilia Petrarca, writing for New York magazine, called the brand’s flagship product “a uniquely French combination of bohemian ease and bourgeois austerity, a Chanel jacket meets a Champion hoodie meets a baby onesie.”
It’s not all that surprising to note that crewneck cardigans began flooding the womenswear market shortly afterwards. What is surprising, though, is just how fast men—increasingly blasé about gendered clothing, especially Miu Miu’s—embraced their appeal, too. The silhouette toes a delicate line: new to the menswear canon, perhaps, but familiar enough that guys like Paul Mescal, a patron saint of the style, can envision how it would slot into their wardrobes.
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