The Most Stylish Guys You Know Are Getting Everything Tailored (Even T-shirts)

SOMETIMES WHEN Evan Glick, who’s cursed with a “fairly short torso,” tries on T-shirts in stores, “it just looks like I’m wearing a summer dress.” But if you spotted the 32-year-old Brooklyn data engineer in the street, you’d never mistake his top for a frock. Last summer, he began taking his tees and shorts to get tailored at his local wash and fold, for $15 a pop. Now everything fits snugly. “I don’t have to be disappointed with a too-big shirt,” he said.

A tailored T-shirt? Many men reserve tailoring for pricey, special-occasion suits. But in-the-know guys are turning to local, low-key tailors—with no hint of stuffy Savile Row—to tweak casual items from jeans to swim trunks. The move neatly solves an oft-ignored problem: Most off-the-rack clothes fit guys imperfectly. Men can easily look disheveled in too-long jeans or toothpick-armed in polos with gaping sleeves.

It’s Not Just for the Rich

For less money and effort than you’d think, a smarter-looking wardrobe awaits. Getting casual items tailored is “like a cheat code,” said Jermaine Crawford, 30, a Los Angeles actor who has all his jeans nipped at the waist because he finds belts bothersome.

But even men less hostile to belts are seeking help. Over the past two years, Yamil Vaca, founder of Manhattan’s Flatiron Tailor Shop, has noticed more guys bringing in casual items. Most commonly submitted for surgery: tees that billow, jeans that puddle on the floor and running shirts that run too roomy. Men with ill-fitting pajama sets also want his services. Vaca’s prices start at around $20 for abbreviating a pair of pants, and often just one, 5-minute fitting is required. Usually the tweaked item can be picked up in 24 hours if needed (the industry standard is about 3-7 days).

Less? Yep. More? Sure.

In many cases, said Vaca, guys with newly rigorous workout regimens want more-fitted clothes to better flaunt their physiques. But a good tailor can magically make items bigger too. A client of New York personal stylist Turner Allen recently lamented the too-short sleeves on a chore jacket. So a clever tailor stole fabric from its back to lengthen them. Allen doubts most men “would know you could do that, but it made all the difference.”

One particularly egregious issue any good tailor can easily fix? Overly roomy shirt sleeves that make men’s arms look spindly. L.A. style consultant Andrew Weitz said he’s always having clients’ sleeves narrowed. Recently, one guy’s knit polo with short but cavernous sleeves got the treatment and suddenly he looked like he’d been eating his spinach. “Now it hugs his biceps and gives him that [defined] arm shape,” said Weitz.

Weitz also finds swim shorts often disappoint off-the-rack. “A lot of guys feel they’re a little too long,” he said, so they’ll get an inch or so snipped off. Flashing more thigh gives the illusion of longer, leaner legs, he said. Swim shorts should hit at about mid-quad, he added.

L.A. stylist Ugo Mozie seeks out tailoring to alter garments more dramatically. He once tasked his tailor with transforming a women’s trench-coat dress into a men’s jacket. For less statuesque clients, he has shirts, T-shirts and tank tops all hewed to right below the waist. That length works on shorter guys, said Mozie—it suggests “a longer frame.”

How to Ease In Gradually

Whether you’re after a startling chop or a subtle tweak, you’ll need a trustworthy tailor. Beyond checking reviews, experts suggest first testing a new tailor with an easy alteration, like hemming some pants. “If you’re happy with that, you can take a shirt to be slimmed, and then a blazer to be altered,” said Allen. “Start small and go from there.” Snip by snip, let the style upgrade begin.

They Got What Tailored?

Insiders report on some of the unlikely items that men have been getting tweaked

1. Sportswear

Billowing running tops and Lycra cycling tights in need of extra tightening are a common sight at Manhattan’s Flatiron Tailor Shop, said Vaca.

2. Swimwear

Lots of guys find swim trunks a little too long off-the-rack, said Weitz. He’ll ask a tailor to slice about an inch off. Result: Guys’ legs look longer (and they can sun their thighs).

3. Casual slacks

Mozie’s hot tip to achieve a louche pant cut? Buy a wide-leg pair in a slightly too-big size and get the waist and upper thigh taken in. This, he said, achieves the ideal relaxed shape.

4. Pajamas

Vaca has been seeing more sleepwear drift into his shop—especially pajama sets that men want either lengthened or trimmed. “I guess guys want to feel stylish right before they go to bed.”

5. Workwear

Allen recently had the sleeves of a chore jacket lengthened for a long-limbed client whose wrists were awkwardly sticking out.

6. Knitwear

When a knit polo or a sweater is too voluminous, Weitz will have a tailor “take in the body.” Even if it’s meant to be an oversize design, too many guys end up swimming in their sweaters, he said. It shouldn’t wear you, he added.

There is ample and alarming evidence that artificial intelligence can help humans do bad things, such as committing cyberattacks, building weapons and even killing themselves or others. The Hugging Face hacking episode—and a growing list of others by poorly constrained swarms of agents—indicate just how powerful and potentially dangerous AI has quickly become.

Yet many inside the U.S. AI industry insist far worse is coming, on account of the imminent arrival of AI with superhuman and self-improving abilities.

Plenty of experts, including many who study AI harms for a living, are skeptical. The so-called doomers’ assertion that AI might decide to wipe out all of humanity—or even “just” topple human civilization—is contingent on it achieving a pace of development not yet seen.

And if the assumptions behind this global-doomsday scenario are wrong, it could lead us to curb or regulate AI in ways that don’t address its real harms.

At the center of this debate is the claim that current AI systems might take over the job of training their next versions, a process called “recursive self-improvement.” Think of it like evolution on steroids—billions of years happening at light speed within vast AI supercomputers. Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei recently proposed a global agreement to slow down the pace of releasing new AI models, with the goal of delaying the arrival of recursive self-improvement.

“I don’t think we’re anywhere near ‘artificial general intelligence,’” says Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the nonprofit research group Santa Fe Institute who studies AI. She said AI is making impressive strides but thinks claims by engineers that they’ve achieved recursive self-improvement don’t stand up to scrutiny.

She is hardly alone. A recent paper by two dozen academics at Princeton, Stanford and other institutions found that even the most cutting-edge AIs are incapable of doing the original research required to advance the AI frontier.

Two of the authors involved in that paper also threw cold water on the idea that the Hugging Face swarm hack by OpenAI agents occurred because of a breakthrough in intelligence. The attack succeeded primarily because of a lack of basic technical guardrails, not an unmanageable explosion in AI capability, they wrote.

Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta, posted that this analysis was “a welcome dose of sanity in an otherwise insane debate.”

OpenAI and Anthropic didn’t respond to several requests for comment.

The people who disagree with the doomers still consider AI to be dangerous, and point out that such systems don’t have to be particularly capable to be powerful. Some argue that AI should undergo regular evaluation by outsiders and that the companies that make it should be held responsible when their systems do harm. AI should also be treated the same as airplanes and elevators, and should be designed to do the least harm possible, they say.

“If you believe that technology is powerful enough to create novel, dangerous viruses, or to essentially take over the whole planet for some reason, then it must also be strong enough to create cures for cancer, to cure aging, to fix socio-economic or political problems,” says Christopher Canal, CEO of EquiStamp, a company that helps companies and governments evaluate AIs.

AI has shown an ability to rapidly advance because it is matching the abilities of humans who are constantly feeding it their knowledge. Sometimes it can recombine that knowledge and exceed what people have been capable of, through a kind of post-training known as reinforcement learning, as we’ve seen in mathematics.

Today’s LLMs are “models of knowledge” rather than actually intelligent, wrote Yi Ma, professor of AI at Hong Kong University.

Researchers at universities and commercial AI research labs in China wrote in a recent paper that autonomous, self-improving AI is likely to be a long way off, due to the sheer number of breakthroughs required. They also argue that humans will probably remain in the loop, supervising that process—and gating how fast it can occur.

Vals AI, a company that evaluates today’s AI models, maintains an RSI Index that benchmarks whether models can “do the research that builds the next model.” So far, no publicly released model is even close.

Yet Rayan Krishnan, CEO of Vals AI, says his team projects models will exceed humans’ ability to improve the next generation of AIs by August 2027, or sooner, and at that point could start building their successors all on their own.

“Once we get to recursive self-improvement, the fear is that all bets are off,” he says. “You could end up with a ‘fast takeoff’ situation, where the models quickly acquire skills and eclipse humans across every possible domain.”

In a reply to the resignation tweet heard round the world from Jacob Coxon, another Anthropic engineer declared his belief that those odds were at least 10% over the next decade. Many others in the industry chimed in to say they thought the percentage was even higher.

Some who argue the end is nigh say they calculate their personal p(doom) based on a chain of conditional probabilities—a bit like the Drake equation for calculating the likelihood of intelligent alien life. Since all those probabilities are based on speculation, estimates range from 0% to nearly 100%. Many land around 10%.

“The weird thing is that if you go back and look at the predictions on this over the last 10 years or more, it’s always been 10%—it’s just a nice round number,” says Mitchell. “I think it’s all vibes, and there’s no actual evidence or calculation.”

One argument against worrying about superintelligent AI is that the world is full of unlikely humanity-ending disasters, and trying to avert them all can make it impossible to prioritize, says Canal.

This has led AI experts and the policymakers who listen to them to propose remedies that don’t get at its real and present dangers.

AI companies’ proposals to “pace the frontier” aren’t addressing the problem in the right way, argues Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical Artificial Intelligence.

“It’s like saying we’re driving toward the cliff at 60 miles per hour and we’re going to drive toward it at 40 miles per hour instead, and everything will be OK,” he says.

Russell and his peers have proposed that AI companies should have to meet the same standards that govern other areas of everyday life, from air travel and buildings to food and drugs. They highlight the “behavioral red lines” AI should not be allowed to cross. Breaking into other computer systems, stealing information or advising terrorists on how to build biological weapons are all illegal for a human to do, and should be illegal for companies’ AIs as well, he argues.

The challenge for AI companies in such a proposal, he adds, is that it would be a de facto ban on today’s advanced AI systems, since the companies behind them don’t know how to make them respect such boundaries all of the time.

Others have proposed something like the Food and Drug Administration, but for AI, but setting up a new agency has so far been a nonstarter in Congress. And some prominent voices in tech have said such a structure would give up America’s AI edge to China.

Given the bipartisan groundswell of support for curbing AI companies and their creations, however, that may soon change.

“The tech industry has had this mantra for decades that regulation is bad,” says Russell. “They don’t accept the liability for any harm, and they hide behind free speech. That, I think, has to change.”