Designer fashion is no longer just for gay men and Europeans. Welcome to the age of sartorial enlightenment, in which the average male has shed schlumpiness for style.

The scene was a Williamsburg restaurant, packed with the usual array of hip beard-farmers. There was a cookie-cutter likeness about the men in the room, an aesthetic Brooklyn lockstep. Everyone seemed to have gotten the same style memo, the one that called for cardigans with granddad shawl collars, for select brands of pricey Japanese denim and for glasses that make you look like you’ve read too much Ayn Rand.

About the last name you’d expect to invoke in a room full of young fops in highly considered finery is that of Joe Namath. And yet suddenly I found myself thinking about Broadway Joe. You remember him, of course, the quarterback legend and media gadfly, a self-styled cartoon whose athletic prowess was pretty nearly overshadowed by his randy off-the-field antics. Goofy-handsome and with gull-wing bangs swooping back from his forehead, Joe had woolly pecs, a dense Happy Trail and a wardrobe that called to mind a coal-town Oscar Wilde.

They come running just as fast as they can.