With the addition of a new section, men may be getting more out of The New York Times than knowing stock prices and where our relationship with Russia stands.

Now, they can also get style advice.

On April 3 The New York Times debuted Men’s Style — the first new launch of a print section of the newspaper since 2005. The new section will appear in the newspaper the first Friday of each month, and will incorporate stories about men’s fashion and grooming, profiles and personal essays.

The first edition of Men’s Style featured a cover story on wearing spring suits, a profile of the surfer-turned-menswear designer Kelly Slater, an informative piece on grooming, a piece on the manliness of using emoji and some talk on travel. It is, in other words, pretty much exactly what is expected when the paper’s iconic Style section gets “Men’s” joined to its name.

So why the new addition?

The fashion industry has been known to be quite one-sided. With dozens of different magazines just for women’s fashion and women’s clothing sections that push the men to the back corner, it’s safe to say that females own the fashion industry.

But recently men’s fashion has started to pick up interest and become an area of growth for retailers. The menswear market has been on an upswing for the past few years and is expected to reach $40 billion in sales in the United States by 2019, according to the market research firm, Euromonitor International.

“The men’s market is very hot right now,” said Brendan Monaghan, The Times’ vice president of luxury advertising, to New York Magazine’s The Cut. “Last year, we saw a 30 percent increase in men’s related ads in the newspaper, T and digital combined. The demand for this is huge.”

Large retailers have been expanding the men’s sections of their stores to be more accommodating to the growing interest in men’s fashion. Stores such as H&M, Gap and Forever 21 have grown their men’s sections to take up larger portions of their stores. Even in some cases, like in the global brand Topshop, their men’s fashion has its grown to match its women’s fashion counterpart.

Right now there are very few other publications whose sole purpose is to explore men’s fashion. Big-name men’s magazines such as GQ and Esquire have style sections, but they usually do very little to push the boundaries of men’s fashion. Their spreads usually consist of different types of suits and include infographics on how to perfectly tie your tie or the best way to roll your sleeves.

The only publications that appear to be making any headway are the Financial Times with its lavish, glossy How To Spend It section and The Wall Street Journal’s weekly Saturday lifestyle and fashion section, Off Duty. Both publications provide fierce competition for luxury ad dollars and providing the hottest, quickest fashion content.

If anything, the new section will have to live up to The New York Times’ reputation for comprehensive, fair and fast coverage. Many will be hoping that translates back to style — coverage of men’s runway shows, reporting fads before they become trends, highlighting the up-and-coming in the men’s fashion industry.

The first edition was a little behind in the fashion news, but with any new publication there is going to be a little catch-up time. The mere presence of the section and the fact that there are 32 pages of it show that The New York Times is taking men’s fashion seriously.

It will be interesting to see the direction the section goes in, and to see if The Times can stay with the fashion times.

Alexis McDonell is a junior magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly in Pulp. You can email her at admcdone@syr.edu.

Published on April 12, 2015 at 9:24 pm