Davos parkas through the years

Davos is, first and foremost, a place to be seen; its main drag is called the Promenade for a reason. And the star of this alpine runway are the parkas, which get more airtime than the tailored suits under them.

We asked everyone’s favorite online fashion critic, Derek Guy, aka the Twitter menswear guy and author of the Die, Workwear! blog, to sift through the Davos archives with us. He was mostly unimpressed from about 2005 onward. “As tailored clothing has slowly disappeared, so has the dress coat,” he said. Performance sportswear for miles.

Call it the decline of conspicuous consumption. “If you look at the Wall Street guys today, they’re mostly not wearing Rolexes or Pateks,” Guy tells Semafor. “The flex is that you’re a mountain biker and wearing the digital exercise watch.”