She took to TikTok. “I’m looking for a man in finance, with a trust fund, 6-5, blue eyes,” she bopped in a Valley Girl twang, adding that she may have made “the song of the summer.”
“Make this into an actual song plz just for funzies,” she told her viewers.
The results were more than funzies. Now, Boni says she’s made more than six figures from her 19-second joke, which has been viewed more than 47 million times and stitched endlessly, and has even quit her job as a salesperson at a sports apparel company. David Guetta remixed her vocals on top of the 2010 club hit “Like a G6.” She has a distribution deal with Capitol Records. “I really just tried to think about the most impossible traits to find,” she said. “It was satire.”
And yet, she said, “if that guy asked me out, I would totally go out with him, just to see if he had a personality.”
“It’s the summer of finance,” Boni said. She was laughing, but her eyes were wide with horror.
In the past few years, men, and the clothes they wear, have gotten more fluid, softer. Men embraced Emily Adams Bode Aujla’s slightly shrunken, romantic workwear, embellished with beads and flowers and twee stitchings of the names of East Coast vacation destinations. It’s not unusual to see straight guys with fingernails painted or spritzing on floral fragrances: Harry Styles, perhaps the paragon of this doe-eyed masculinity, built a whole business out of it. These were the men who, if they were not of age to help elect Barack Obama, pushed the public consciousness to the left; they were of generations that dispelled the stigma of talking about mental health, that advocated for a greater balance between their personal lives and careers. If they could reduce their frustrations and adversaries to one evil word — and they have — it would be capitalism.
But somehow, the attire of pro-capitalism, of number crunchers asking the Chipotle server for extra protein in their burrito bowl, may be the look of the moment. Earlier this month, Jonah Weiner, whose menswear newsletter Blackbird Spyplane treats shopping for ethical and independent brands as reaching a higher form of consciousness, wrote on X that the uniform of quilted vest, brown shoes and tight chinos “has been coded ‘wack’ for so long, it’s on the bleeding edge of sick. It’s how time works.”
At the same time, designers have been racing to make the coolest version of the finance guy staple, the boat shoe — a trend kicked off by Miu Miu in its spring 2024 show, which was like a turbo remix of the Martha’s Vineyard off-duty wardrobe, and Bally, which is reinventing the vision of Switzerland, the land of globally aspirational banking, as something sweet and quirky through a $990 Sperry-like moccasin it calls the Plume.
Even the co-hosts of “How Long Gone”, a keystone of this considered, semi-enlightened breed of masculinity, have made a boat shoe, leading the Business of Fashion to declare that the loafer — the loafer! — is in the midst of a “boom.”
“The old-school preppy aesthetic, which is sort of evolving from all of the quiet luxury stuff that we’ve been hearing about for two years now, feels really popular — you know, the Etsy vintage Polo Ralph Lauren big striped oxford shirts,” said Emily Sundberg, who writes the popular business Substack newsletter Feed Me. “More and more brands are dabbling into more sophisticated menswear, and I think there’s more places for men to learn about getting dressed.” They’re no longer just looking to Supreme or the Kith lookbook: “There are these huge TikTok and Twitter personalities who are breaking down the science of a well-fitting suit or a well-fitting oxford shirt.”
And yet not so long ago, “finance bros” were the butt of the joke. Now, suddenly, they seem to possess mystique. When did we all get bullish for finance men?
It’s not as if the finance guy fetish came out of nowhere. For scores of men, Patrick Bateman, the murderous, status-crazy villain at the center of Bret Easton Ellis’s satire “American Psycho,” has long been a template for masculine living. His bizarre multistep morning routine, immortalized in the 2000 film adaptation by a glass-faced Christian Bale, became a foundation of, first, incel culture and more recently, looksmaxxing, in which men rate one another’s appearance on a scale of antiquated standards of jawline and fitness.
But fashion designers, and the people who follow them, typically avert the status quo, rather than adhere to it. And yet this image of two young finance interns, taken by Joel Sternfeld in the go-go 1980s, has appeared on countless mood board Instagram accounts — the kinds that gather images that eventually trickle up and onto the inspiration boards of runway and fast fashion creative directors.
John F. Kennedy Jr., in his boxy power suits and workout attire, has also become a summer style template, with Loewe designer Jonathan Anderson re-creating a graphic T-shirt reading “I TOLD YA” that Kennedy once wore, both for the Luca Guadagnino film “Challengers” and as a piece of merch. If even Anderson, the most out-there, avant-gardist working in fashion, is looking at the wardrobe of suit guys, something is up.
Sundberg said that, anecdotally at least, she’s heard that a number of friends and peers who once rejected the conservatism of finance to embrace the high-minded ambition of tech are now regretting their choices amid layoffs and slashed salaries in Silicon Valley: “The quote-unquote balance of power has shifted back toward finance having more prestige.” Along with that, in the wake of the pandemic, shows like “Industry” and “Succession” have made back-to-office dressing aspirational, leading labels like Marc Jacobs, Kim Kardashian’s Skims and Sandy Liang to celebrate cubicle lifestyle almost like something foreign, a moment Sundberg calls “corporate fetish” but has elsewhere been anointed “office siren.”
The internet is rife with boneheaded trends that have no tether to reality. But the encroaching of the finance-guy archetype into pockets of pop culture where he previously would not have tread seems beyond aesthetic, hinting at new priorities among millennials and Gen Zers who have struggled to find solid footing amid social and financial upheaval.
In a recent book, “Triumph of the Yuppies,” journalist Tom McGrath traces the rise of the young urban professional from his beginnings as a passionate campus liberal baby boomer, rallying against the conformity of his parents, to an outright champion of capitalism and designer logos. If the rich once lived quietly, even discreetly, “a new generation of the affluent, despite their cultural roots in the egalitarianism of the ’60s, wanted to live, in many respects, like the old-money tycoons of the earthly twentieth century.”
Young people, who have been resistant to traditional corporate offices, are unlikely to share that sentiment. But they also have a fixation on signifiers of wealth that echoes that of these yuppie forebears. Before “old money TikTok” existed, there was Lisa Birnbach’s “The Official Preppy Handbook,” a satirical ethnography of Ivy Leaguers and their byzantine, unspoken social rules, released in 1980. What made the preppy handbook a bestseller, McGrath writes, is that “some portion of readers, at a moment when money and success were becoming more appealing than they’d been in a long time, just might have missed the joke.”
Even the middle class, shrinking as a result of Reaganite tax cuts, began to see the rich as role models instead of objects of ridicule. Whereas previous generations looked to members of their own economic class to make purchasing decisions, media focus on the top income brackets meant that fancy cars, Cuisinarts and granite countertops became aspirational to all kinds of Americans, increasing consumer debt in 1984 by 21 percent and 18 percent the following year.
“A great many baby boomers are really faced with downward mobility at a time when the dream is upward mobility,” a researcher wrote. “The American reality is they will not live as well as their parents did. But you’re looking at a group of people who haven’t faced that reality. And they’re still seeking that big house and a BMW.”
Alternatively, people in their 20s and 30s today see brand names and luxury goods not as symbols that they’ve made it — indeed, many fear they never will “make it.” Rather, they are temporary comforts, talismans of the look of security even as material certainty escapes them.
The fact that Boni made more money from a song satirizing Wall Street culture than she did at her 9-to-5 job suggests just how difficult it’s become to navigate the traditional ladder of achievement. Now, what everyone once expected in life — a career, a steady income, a finance-guy husband — has become so out of reach that it seems exotic.
In fashion there are few rules anymore, though one that remains, albeit unspoken, is that nothing is more intriguing stylistically than what repulses us. There is a lengthy history — one nearly as long as the history of fashion itself — of designers appropriating what may be considered unstylish or uncool, proclaiming what was taboo just days ago to be the next great trend.
Now it may be that financial stability seems so out there that it is ready material for the hands and minds of people whose clothes, on runways, social media or the grainy glow of Zoom calls, help us recognize the look of contemporary society.
What happens when, inevitably, the trend cycle decides to expend with the finance guy? Boni is not worried about the fleeting nature of fame: She is finishing her MBA this fall.
