'Vogue' Says Guy Fieri's Flame Shirt Is Inspiring This Year's Menswear

Where's Flavortown, USA, you ask? Why, it’s all around us, strutting its stuff on the runway and coming to a store near you.

That’s right, folks—now here’s a sartorial trend I can really cosign. Guy Fieri has long been mocked for wearing a bowling shirt that bears the image of flames fierce enough to melt those frosted tips on his head. You could say that in the past, he’s really come “under fire” for what some may consider too tacky a fashion choice to support.

Well, joke's on you, fashionistas and sartorial snobs. Flame prints are now engulfing the runways, as Vogue observed in a trend piece published on Wednesday that credits Fieri with popularizing the look. (Fieri's team did not respond to immediate request for comment from MUNCHIES on Friday.)

“Flame shirts may be the least sexy clothes in existence,” Vogue's Liana Satenstein writes. Speak for yourself! Satenstein does note, though, that while Fieri doesn't have a monopoly on flame shirts, he may have become "the best seared-in-the-brain example of the unforgettable look."

The world's most respected fashion publication goes on to observe that the flame was everywhere on the men's runway during recent presentations of Fall 2018 collections, from fiery "T-shirts as prints" to necklace pendants made by Dior Homme to "black squiggles on the jeans at Vetements" to button-ups from SSS World Corp and Prada.

They’re everywhere, in other words. We didn't start the fire—it was always burning as long as Fieri's been turning.

Vogue's editors were mixed on the proliferation of this trend; some finding that wearing a cartoonish, huge print of a blaze is too obliviously uncool, with others feeling that a more subtle fire print—say, a flicker, a more low-key flame—might be more socially permissible to be seen wearing in public. One thing is clear: Fieri's been “too hot to handle” all this time. It's high time we stop ridiculing his flame shirt, waltzing on the catwalks and into your closet. Literally iconic.