Every so often, an image will emerge, unbidden from the subconscious. In it, an aspirant musician in a shawl-collared cardigan and a low-cut T-shirt delivers an acoustic rendition of a Plain White T’s song on American Idol, standing before Simon Cowell. He is wearing slim fit jeans, boat shoes, and perhaps even a Fedora—but I unfortunately have a condition where my brain refuses to register the presence of men in jaunty hats. (Now women, that’s a different story.)

This will be a familiar portrait to anyone who lived between 2010 and 2014, where the convergent forces of Hedi Slimane, American Apparel, and the second “metrosexual” wave empowered a particular type of man to brandish collarbone and sternum. Men who cast themselves as raffish Lotharios of the indie rock scene through scoopnecks, clavicle-caressing shirts, and deep V knitwear. It was an erotic look—if you are susceptible to the kind of person who purchases pre-layered necklaces from Topman—which has resurfaced for the spring 2027 menswear shows in Milan for Pitti Uomo and Paris Men’s. And they’re saying it with their chest.

Yes, there have been lots of fashion shows over the past decade which have featured various interpretations on the deep-cut tee—clinging to Rick Owens’s models like ectoplasm or scooping up the barrel chests at Dolce & Gabbana—it’s just that their appearance back on the spring 2027 runways feels salient, backdropped against Gen Z’s continuous appetite for 2010’s arcana, and defining what feels like a real breakaway from the tyranny of tastefulness that has dominated menswear in recent years. The deeper slashed, décolletage-revealing shapes arrive alongside playful flashes of color, texture, and other areas of flesh.

There were the navel-grazing necklines and sub-pectoral vests at Dolce & Gabbana, amid a collection that deployed assertive tailoring with Macramé lace and rhinestone encrustations—Sicilian holidays done to the most maximal. At Prada, tops were scoopnecked and second-skin, cropped, or removed altogether to let the body breathe under slender co-ords and jewel-toned suits. Even knit sweaters, styled over pale shirts, fell to almost contour the obliques. Zegna’s own knitwear swept a delicate, elegant line beneath the clavicles: there was a suite of zesty-toned grandfather cardis, shackets, safari jackets, and shirts. The latter featured front slits that, as Luke Leitch wrote in his review, were “cut so deep [they] almost demanded to be accessorized with high-shine medallions and luxuriant chest hair.”

For Simone Rocha’s very first all-menswear show, the designer built upon her male character and remained true to her tender, extremely feminine point of view, through a parade of frilly-collared, diaphanous, and sheer v-necks. Then, at Dior, a continuation of that slimmer menswear silhouette which Anderson played with for fall 2026, all glittery going-out tops and nip-waisted bar jackets. This time, deep cut and shredded cardis, as well as chest-baring housecoats.

Unlike their 2010s proponents, many of these pieces flirted with a level of sophistication hitherto unassociated with their 2010 proponents. The resounding mood of this season, finally, finds duality in put-togetherness and being a bit playful: Dressed-up, dandyish. That is, of course, a different kind of eroticism to the lassitude that collected around the low-cut look in the 2010s—which saw Jude Law referred to as a European gigolo—and caused moral panic among gonzo broadsheet columnists.

As journalist Alexis Petridis wrote of the era’s plunging necklines in 2010: “They can’t possibly be wearing them for aesthetic reasons. They look horrible if you have a pale, flat, hairy chest. But they’re equally horrible if you’re buff, lending the wearer a kind of cleavage, something you want to see on a man only if he’s in the Alternative Miss World.” Not everyone will have the moxie to reveal their décolleté–it would seem being svelte and hairless are still physical requirements–but the world might direct less suspicion towards a man in a scoop neck or bellybutton-flasher in 2026/2027.

Petridis’s column—and other time capsule pieces of media like this—are prime examples of the anxieties that surrounded so-called “metrosexual” men. Those image-obsessed effeminates who trespassed the most staid gender binaries because they dared to reveal a triangle of bare chest beneath a fine-gauze knit. These men were “douchebags” and “high street gigolos.” Too vain! Too feminine! Too homoerotic! Mercifully, the crass “metrosexual” term—along with the words “manscaping” and “heavage”—has fallen out of usage, with menswear becoming evermore porous and accommodating of diverse identities. The feminine scoop-neck or any neckline of a kind that makes more of a beeline for the belly is not the perverse, subversive threat it once perceived to be. In 2026, gay men have never dressed so “straight,” more likely to wear Bermuda shorts and dirted tank tops than Timothée Chalamet’s ruffled blouses. Perhaps, then, the true enemy of the 2010s was not the low-cut tee itself, but culture’s refusal to let a gentleman walk into Zara and express himself. Even if that meant wearing brogues with no socks. And even if that meant liberating the breast bone with an air of je ne sais quoi from time to time.