At recent fashion weeks, the runway looked less like a catwalk and more like a gym floor. Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson walked the runway in Paris wearing a skin-tight knit that emphasised every contour of his physique. American football player Gavin Weiss appeared in a Gucci show wearing shirts cut to highlight his muscular build. Designers across Milan, Paris, and New York sent out silhouettes built around sculpted torsos and exaggerated shoulders. After several years of softer aesthetics and gender-fluid styling, the muscular male body seemed suddenly back in fashion.
Many observers described the shift as a return to hypermasculinity. Yet fashion rarely invents such changes on its own. Runways tend to mirror deeper cultural currents already unfolding in society. The renewed fascination with the muscular male body tells us something important about the moment we are living through.
Across the world, a generation of young men has turned toward a culture of relentless self-optimisation. Gym memberships are rising. Protein supplements have become a mass-market industry. Social media platforms are filled with transformation videos and advice on sculpting the ideal male physique. Online communities promote what they call “looksmaxxing”, the belief that appearance can be systematically improved through discipline, grooming, and training.
The body has become a project.
This transformation reflects a broader shift in how masculinity is performed in the digital age. For much of the twentieth century, male identity was anchored in relatively stable markers: Profession, authority, social status, and economic security. These markers defined masculinity in visible and recognisable ways.
But the spaces where identity is now performed — Instagram, TikTok, and other algorithm-driven platforms — operate on a different logic. They reward immediacy and visual impact. A well-toned body, unlike a professional résumé or social standing, is instantly legible on a screen.
Muscles travel well online.
The algorithmic economy of attention favours images that are striking and easily understood. In this environment, the disciplined male body becomes a powerful symbol. It signals effort, control, and ambition in a form that can be recognised within seconds.
Fashion, always sensitive to shifts in cultural imagination, is responding accordingly.
Menswear today is no longer the quiet counterpart to women’s fashion. It has become one of the fastest-growing segments of the global fashion industry. Grooming, skincare, and fitness culture have expanded alongside it. Male consumers are investing unprecedented time and money in their appearance.
The muscular aesthetic appearing on runways reflects this expanding male self-consciousness. Yet the significance of this trend becomes even clearer when viewed from the Indian context.
India is undergoing a profound transformation of masculine identity. Rapid urbanisation, economic change, and the spread of digital culture have reshaped the landscape in which young men define themselves. The older scripts of masculinity — stable careers, predictable life trajectories, and clearly structured social hierarchies — no longer provide the same certainty they once did.
In such moments of transition, the body often becomes a site of control. Unlike economic success or social mobility, which depend on complex external forces, physical transformation appears within personal reach. With discipline and routine, the body can be shaped, measured, and improved.
The rapid expansion of the fitness industry across Indian cities reflects this shift. Gyms, supplement stores, and personal trainers have become fixtures of urban life. Social media amplifies the process by constantly presenting idealised physiques as aspirational models.
But the renewed celebration of hypermuscular masculinity also deserves careful reflection.
For much of the past decade, conversations about masculinity had begun to move in a different direction. Movements advocating gender equality encouraged a broader understanding of male identity — one that allowed emotional openness, vulnerability, and flexibility in gender roles.
Fashion itself seemed to reflect that shift. Runways increasingly showcased softer silhouettes, fluid styling, and a wider range of masculine expressions.
The current return of the hypermuscular ideal risks narrowing that space again.
When the ideal male body becomes defined by extreme physical perfection, the pressure it places on young men can be considerable. The pursuit of the “perfect physique” is rarely as effortless as motivational social media posts suggest. It can lead to cycles of comparison, dissatisfaction, and unrealistic expectations.
For decades, women have lived under the burden of rigid beauty standards. Increasingly, men are encountering their own version of that pressure.
The irony is that the culture of self-optimisation frequently presents itself as empowerment. Discipline, fitness, and self-care are framed as signs of personal improvement. In many ways, they are. Physical fitness undoubtedly contributes to health and well-being. Yet when the body becomes the primary currency of masculine identity, something more complicated begins to unfold. The muscular silhouettes now appearing on global runways are less about nostalgia for traditional masculinity and more about a new digital-age performance of strength.
The challenge for societies such as India is not to reject fitness culture or aesthetic expression. Rather, it is to ensure that the expanding conversation about masculinity does not collapse into a single, restrictive ideal.
Fashion trends will inevitably change. What matters more is how societies interpret the ideas those trends carry. If the muscular man has returned to the runway, the question worth asking is not simply whether the look will last. It is: What kind of masculinity are we choosing to celebrate? Because the real strength of a society lies not in the perfection of its bodies, but in the breadth of identities it allows to flourish.
The writer is associate professor and programme coordinator for fashion design at IILM University, Gurugram
