This week, a look at the gearhead tendencies among menswear enthusiasts and how influencers and resellers have leveraged it. Scroll down to use Glossy+ Comments, giving the Glossy+ community the opportunity to join discussions around industry topics.
Last month, when Glossy asked a selection of men about the influencers driving their apparel purchases, their answers were all over the place, ranging from fictional characters like James Bond to their own grandfathers. But one name was mentioned repeatedly: Albert Muzquiz.
Better known as Edgy Albert, the 28-year-old TikTok and Instagram creator told Glossy he bristles at the term “content creator.”
“It’s so weird, so vague,” he said. “So many of the people who share the same title and space as menswear content creators are just models who realized they could monetize wearing clothes. They don’t have a genuine love for the garments and the craft that went into making them.”
That obsession with the minutiae of the clothes he wears — much of it vintage and made by classic American menswear designers like Ralph Lauren — is a hallmark of Muzquiz’s presence on the internet. It’s also representative of a kind of gearhead approach to menswear that has emerged in the last few years, in which obsession with the particulars of clothing is common.
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While other content creators post thirst traps, Muzquiz’s Instagram account, where he has 245,000 followers, is filled with videos of him monologuing at length about the history of selvedge denim or exploring a cache of 1980s Levi’s catalogs. At Vassar College, where Muzquiz studied history, he wrote a thesis on the history of denim.
Muzquiz’s musings on the history of fashion are uncharacteristically verbose for the style influencer sector, where image and vibe tend to overrule everything. His verbosity and enthusiasm for exploring fashion history led him to launch a Substack newsletter in February where he can expound at length. While his Substack audience is only a fraction of his 316,000 followers on TikTok, he’s managed to grow the subscriber base to more than 2,000 with infrequent but in-depth posts.
“On TikTok, I do a lot of educational stuff, a lot of history,” Muzquiz said. “But the algorithm rules all, so I mix in other stuff. Substack is a way for me to prove that I genuinely care about fashion and garments. It’s not just a cash grab.”
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But for a certain type of man, obsessing over the details and history of a specific overcoat or pair of jeans has an appeal. The same way passionate watch enthusiasts speak about the differences between manual and automatic movements in watches, there’s a growing subset of menswear enthusiasts who don’t just want to wear the clothes, but they also want to know everything about the pieces. You can see it in popular podcasts like Throwing Fits and in the growing popularity of Derek Guy, another menswear guru — his long X threads about obscure menswear particularities have given him an audience of over 500,000 followers despite never posting a picture of himself.
Guy often jokes about how he spent his formative years in hyper-niche menswear discussion groups on websites like Styleforum, where he had long digressive arguments with other fashion nerds about things like trouser breaks. But it’s the depth of knowledge he developed over those years that has led to his popularity now. The kinds of things that are common knowledge on menswear forums get a broader audience on social media, he said.
“I did a thread last year on quality cashmere,” Guy told Glossy. “If I were to write that on a menswear blog, it would be almost like basic information. If you’re regularly reading a menswear blog, you probably already know this stuff. But on Twitter [now known as X], that stuff reaches a whole new audience.”
But Muzquiz said many of the people versed in these sorts of arcane debates over fashion details are not equipped to make something that is both educational and accessible.
“Many of the denim-head kind of crowd didn’t transcend beyond those forums,” Muzquiz said. “They were too gearhead-focused. I try to find a way to bridge that gap — to educate and give context on the finer points while keeping it jocular and light.”
An obsession with the esoterica of clothes is also what has driven the rise of sneakerhead culture, another major factor in the growth of men’s fashion. Sneaker consumers have a deep knowledge of the history of the products they buy, and resellers must have a just as good, if not better, understanding of a product, in order to make money.
Sneaker reseller Mustafa Hamed told Glossy he had almost no knowledge of sneakers when he first sold a pair on StockX and made a $70 profit. But as his business has grown to become one of the top resellers on StockX, selling almost 8,000 sneakers a month, his knowledge of the minutiae has had to grow to match.
He pointed to the Adidas Samba trend last year, when he was able to buy around 300 pairs for $100 each and sell them all for over $250. By keeping a close eye on trends and having a deep well of knowledge of models like Air Force 1s and Jordans, Hamed has been able to grow his sneaker reselling operation to a $2 million business with three employees.
“You have to be 100% knowledgeable, because you have to pick up on trends before anyone else does,” he said. “The buyers are so knowledgeable, and you need to keep up with them.”
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