The meme-driven movement may have peaked, but it helped to birth the style-savvy male consumer on which the fashion industry is betting big as overall luxury growth slows.

NEW YORK, United States — In January 2016, three-year-old menswear shop Carson Street Clothiers moved into a large storefront in downtown New York. The store, which sold brands like Orley, Craig Green and Visvim, had become a sort of gathering place for the city’s menswear community. Its new 3,300-square-foot space, on Greene Street in the middle of Soho, certainly matched the scale of the duo’s ambitions, with its chevron wood floors and cantilever shoe racks. In many ways, Carson Street was a temple to #menswear, a men’s fashion Internet meme that, in recent years, gave rise to the street style peacocks of Pitti Uomo, birthed full-fledged websites and books, and spurred the opening of new men’s-focused stores.

In early February, Carson Street owners Matt Breen and Brian Trunzo introduced their own collection — dubbed Deveaux — at New York Fashion Week: Men’s. The line, which was well received, was to be sold at Carson Street and elsewhere.

So it came as somewhat of a surprise when Trunzo sent out a mass email in late April announcing that he was leaving both Carson Street and Deveaux, effective immediately. In early May, Breen followed up with the news that while he planned to continue with Deveaux, Carson Street would close its doors at the end of June. Soho’s notoriously high rents may have played a role. But it was hard not to read the demise of Carson Street as yet another stake through the heart of the #menswear movement, coming after the late-2015 shuttering of Condé Nast’s Details magazine, whose editors, including Eugene Tong, were lauded as gods by menswear geeks; the January 2016 closure of Complex Media-owned Four Pins, whose editor Lawrence Schlossman served as the clique’s de facto leader; and the end of Japanese publication Free & Easy, a men’s style bible which had been fixated on ametora — Japan’s reinterpretation of “American trad” or heritage style — since 1998.

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