I have a specific memory of buying my dad a cardigan for Christmas, watching him wear it approximately four times, and thinking absolutely nothing of it, because why would I. It’s a cardigan. It’s a sweater with a zipper’s shy cousin down the front. And then someone at a barbecue last month, standing next to the cooler holding a hard seltzer like it was a legal deposition, announced that “straight guys don’t wear cardigans” and I nearly dropped my potato salad. Because I’ve been putting men in cardigans, buying them, gifting them, watching them worn to job interviews and grocery runs, for something like eight years, and it never once occurred to me this was a debate. Apparently it is one.
Apparently it’s been one this whole time and I just missed the memo, standing there fully unbothered while other people were out here assigning sexualities to knitwear.
I went home and thought about it properly, which is more than the barbecue guy did, because his entire argument was “cardigans feel feminine to me” and then he ate a hot dog like that settled it. It didn’t settle it. It made me want to actually work out what’s going on here, because there are two real things tangled up in this question, and they’re not the same thing even though people treat them like they are. One is about the garment itself. The other is about who’s been wearing it and why that got decided for the rest of us.
The garment has never had a gender, the marketing did
Here’s the thing that annoys me most about the barbecue take: cardigans were a men’s garment before they were ever coded as a women’s one. Named after an actual guy, an Earl, who wore a knitted wool waistcoat thing under his military jacket because the Crimean War was cold and he was not about to be fashionable about it, he just wanted to not freeze. Men wore them for decades after that without anyone raising an eyebrow. The “soft, feminine, grandma sweater” association didn’t show up because the garment changed, it showed up because of who got photographed in them and when, and once an item gets stuck in the “women’s cozy loungewear” bucket in enough people’s heads, it stays there whether or not it makes any actual sense.
I sell home goods for a living, not clothes, but the parallel is too good to skip. We had a lamp at work that nobody would buy for two years straight because it looked “like something your aunt owns,” and then a stylist put it in a magazine spread next to a leather couch and suddenly it was “mid century” and sold out in a month. Nothing about the lamp changed. The context around it did. Cardigans are having a slower, messier version of that same swing, and I think the guy at the barbecue is a few years behind the actual shift, not ahead of some rule that’s always existed.
What actually reads as gendered isn’t the garment structure, it’s the details layered on top of it. A cardigan with a shawl collar, chunky wood buttons, and a boxy fit reads completely differently than one with delicate pearl buttons and a fitted, cropped shape, even though they’re both technically “a sweater that opens down the front.” My dad’s cardigan, the one I gave him, has toggle buttons and pockets deep enough to hide a full sandwich in. Nobody’s ever once looked at that thing and thought “feminine.” They thought “grandpa who fixes his own gutters,” which, accurate.
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The real question isn’t the garment, it’s who’s wearing it and how
This is where I think the barbecue guy actually had a sliver of a point buried under a bad delivery, because clothing genuinely does carry meaning based on who’s normally seen in it, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of naive. Straight men absolutely wear cardigans. They wear them constantly, they just don’t call them cardigans half the time, they call them “that sweater” or “my work thing” or don’t name the garment at all because most men do not narrate their outfits the way I apparently do for a living. The garment isn’t the barrier. The styling is, and specifically, how much a guy is willing to let it look intentional versus accidental.
There’s a real difference between a guy throwing on an oversized, slightly shapeless cardigan over a plain tee because it was cold and it was the nearest warm thing on the chair, and a guy who’s clearly chosen a fitted, cropped, statement-button cardigan as the whole point of the outfit. Both are men in cardigans. Only one of them is going to get a comment at a barbecue, and it’s not actually about sexuality at all, it’s about how visibly “styled” the choice looks, because a lot of straight men have been trained to feel weird about looking like they tried. That’s not a cardigan problem. That’s a decades old discomfort with visible effort that shows up everywhere in menswear, from skincare to shoes that aren’t sneakers, and cardigans just happen to be catching the blast radius of it this particular summer.
I’ll be honest about my own bias here because the whole voice of what I do is admitting when I’m wrong, and I think I was wrong to be as smug as I was walking away from that barbecue. I assumed everyone saw cardigans the way I do, as a genuinely gender neutral, slightly grandpa-coded, extremely practical layer that’s saved me from three separate cold offices this year. Not everyone grew up around a dad who wore one constantly without a hint of self consciousness.
Some guys grew up in a house where the only cardigan in sight was on a woman, and that early visual sticks whether it’s fair or not, and I can’t fully argue someone out of a childhood association in one barbecue conversation, no matter how right I think I am.
So here’s where I land, plainly, because I don’t think “it depends” is an actual answer and I refuse to end on that. Straight men wear cardigans, have worn them for over a century, and the ones avoiding them right now aren’t avoiding a garment, they’re avoiding looking like they put thought into an outfit, which is a completely different and much sillier problem to have. The cardigan was never the issue. The discomfort with being seen trying was. Buy the guy the cardigan. Get the one with the deep pockets and the buttons that look like they could survive a hike. He’ll wear it, he’ll call it “that sweater,” and nobody at the next barbecue will say a single word about it.
