Watch: Connor O’Leary’s Wardrobe-Maxxed Cloudbreak Catwalk

Brainrot is wonderful.

A digital landfill of nihilistic zoomers where irony eats itself, trends last six hours, and everyone’s both in on the joke and think it ‘diabolical’.

One related phenomenon, looksmaxxing, is an online trend in which young men strive to become more attractive, often through unhinged protocols like using a theragun to smash their facial bones. Thanks to Clavicular, a young fringe manosphere influencer, this term, and others modelled after it, has proliferated.

You can be a looksmaxxer by soft maxxing (skin care or exercise) or by hard maxxing (plastic surgery or self-mutilation). Looksmaxxers often find themselves jester-maxxing, that is, using humor to gain the attention of women. Or, more perversely by meth-maxxing, because nothing tastes as good as being skinny and locked in feels.

But, in a stunning blow to Clavicular’s cheekbones, Connor O’Leary has made the CT’s most substantial looksmaxxing gains simply by switching his wardrobe provider from Hurley to Afends — the Byron Bay-based boutique brand famed for their tasteful hemp threads and lowkey stacked bench of skaters, freesurfers and CT-winning tastemakers.

Importantly, Afends just released a new collection (see here) and topped it off with a clip of the reigning J Bay champion and Taj Richmond absolutely decimating empty, head high Cloudbreak.

The sartorial gains haven’t gone unnoticed. Medina, fresh off a highly visible Quiksilver raid in Coolangatta, was reportedly asking for an Afends hookup days later, a sentence that likely doesn’t exist in a world where Connor is still zipped into Hurley.

Has a rebrand ever landed so cleanly?