ART AND SOUL

Why the tenets of craft, process and human touch resonate differently with male consumers.

- BY AARON KOK

Men like things. Watches, jackets, gadgets, chairs, coffee equipment with far too many settings, Japanese denim they insist is different from regular denim and so on. Entire swathes of male taste have long been built on the careful study of objects and the pleasure of acquisition. The male consumer, after all, is hardly a new species. He has been marketed to for decades through the language of performance, rarity, engineering and status. Buy this because it lasts longer or works harder, or buy this because the man who knows, knows.

And then, somewhere along the way, the object itself stopped being enough... or rather, surface-level desire deepened further. Increasingly, what seems to hold men's attention is not just the finished thing, but the making of it. The construction, the material, the hours behind how a pair of hands made a wallet more than just a wallet. They're curious about the tannery, the stitch, the edge paint, the way the leather darkens over time. A knitted garment is not simply something to wear, but something to be engineered and laboured over. A fragrance is not only about the bottle on a shelf, but about ingredients, formulation, the person blending it and the story of how it came to be.

That curiosity has begun to stretch far beyond fashion, even if fashion offers some of the clearest evidence of it. You see it in the popularity of pottery classes and tufting workshops, in the rise of small-batch optical makers and independent coffee producers, in the way process videos now circulate online with the same allure campaign images once had.