Some mean really don’t have a clue. Take building workers as an example. Have you ever seen them bend down while working? What do you see… most of their belly hanging out, hairs everywhere, and from the back… well what can I say but what we call in the UK a builders bum with most of it exposed. Not a pretty sight. LOLL
On the other hand other men will be so immaculately dressed they look as though they are straight out of a shop window.
Too immacuate for me. A happy medium I say – smart & neat.

Excuse me, but I am very good at fashion. I can even pick out women’s clothes. I was christmas shopping for my girl, and a woman watching me turned to her husband (clueless guy) and said to him why can’t you be more like him. And I have a lilac shirt. So there.

“Are we as men really that bad at dressing ourselves and appearing”
Only to the observer.

I don’t think men are incapable of dressing themselves. Some of them just don’t have the “tools” or mindset to do it. I mean, I have several guy friends that know how to put together a great outfit for when they go out, and definitely props to @Adirondackwannabe for being able to select something out of the women’s section.

I also don’t think it’s a just a guy thing. Some women have this problem too, unfortunately. :-|

When I get old I steadfastly refuse to wear beige cardigans & trousers where the waistline is somewhere around my ears.Uh huh no sir, no way no how.I shall be a senior fashionista yes that’s what i’ll be.

No, of course it isn’t – some men just don’t give a hoot about how they appear.

@ucme LOLL love your answer about the trouser waistline. Hilarious!!

@partyparty Well I mean come on XD

Let’s hear it for Ed Grimley!

Well, I’m gay, so…

I admit to being clueless about fashion. Even if I had any fashion sense, it’s unlikely that fashionable clothing would fit me or look good on me. I’m glad that for most of my life I didn’t have to make choices, just wear the uniform of the day.

I don’t think it applies strictly to men. I just returned from the grocery store where an attractive young woman was bent over restocking a shelf and half of her buttocks were sticking out for the world to view. Now to some men, this may have seemed like a nice sight, but I found it just as unpleasant as the construction worker described above. I will be glad when these super low hip hugging pants go out of style. And now we have ultra skinny leg hip huggers, omg, how much worse can it get! Is this just in Australia or are they everywhere?

@rooeytoo Got ‘em in the US too.

It certainly doesn’t apply to all men. Personally, I don’t care at all about fashion (though I try to make sure I wear something appropriate to the situation when I leave the house), but I know guys who do. Hell, I know a guy who has his own fashion line.

Culturally (at least in the US) I’d say women tend to care more, but that hardly makes universal.

There is, however, the fact that women’s clothes do tend to have more variety than men’s.

I have to take the word of the tailor when buying suits, as I have no concept of fashion. For all I know, he’s selling me whatever they have in Omar the Tentmaker sizes and laughing behind my back. I feel much more comfortable in LL Bean khakis and hiking boots; to hell with appearance, but I refuse to dress with my butt hanging out.

The type of party scenes that my lady and I attended were mostly variations on Goth theme. I had to piece together something resembling that style, as Goth men’s gear is designed for skinny twentysomethings. Black T-shirt and jeans, biker boots, black leather trench coat and all the requisite spikes, chains, skull jewelry, etc. made up my best approximation of a 50 something Goth. Nobody laughed, but I was the proverbial 400 pound gorilla, so I’d never get an honest opinion.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land I suppose you have to be comfortable in the clothes you wear, and that’s what is important.
BTW love the Goth outfit!!

I think the question you should be asking first is whether what this man looked like had anything to do with the fact that he was a man.
And in order to answer that, a good next question would be whether there are women who dress that badly, and whether they’re less common than men like this guy.

As a complicated side note on how things and their properties relate to each other, maybe you’ll find this article an interesting read. It’s not directly related to this subject, but its insight might help for answering the question.
Or maybe you’ll find it only needlessly complicates the issue.

Tl;dr: It’s generally helpful to think of the meaning of a word like “man” not as a rigid dictionary definition, but as a range of settings on a cluster of properties; there is a certain most typical setting for every variable that corresponds to the perfectly archetypical man, but any existing man will deviate from that perfect configuration, to a different extent for each property.
It’s the only way words like that can be useful in a world where no two men are the same.
So then the question would become: is failing at fashion very typical for men? How much of an exception are you if you’re a fashionable man?

Some guys don’t care. Some don’t have the right body to be able to wear anything fashionable and/or have problems finding things that fit properly.

I would like to be fashionable but I can’t afford to be.