Episode Details

Starting this month, I'm going to do two new things. One is that I'll plan on releasing episodes on a more regular schedule, on the first, third, and fourth Thursdays of each month. The other is that the second of those three episodes will be paywalled, and it will be a bit different in content from my usual podcast. It'll be shorter, typically a half hour give or take, and it will be much more topical than I usually like to be. I'll talk to my guest or guests about some current politics and news, and I'll talk about the literary intellectual controversy or trend of the moment, if there's one at hand when we're recording.I won’t be offended if you don't want to pay, but of course will be grateful if you do. And to my stalwart existing paid subscribers who forked over money when I wasn't even paywalling anything, much gratitude. You're on my hall of honors list, which as you know is hanging in the burned out husk of the Friendly's Restaurant on Sumner Ave in Springfield Massachusetts. -Dan

My guest on the podcast today is Derek Guy, who is North America’s premiere men's fashion journalist and critic. This isn’t a highly competitive category—most fashion writing is dumb and corrupt, and most of it is about women’s fashion—but Derek wears the crown exceptionally well. He shows what’s possible in that space, consistently writing thoughtful, substantive essays not just about what’s hip in men’s fashion but what it means culturally, sociologically, politically.

If you’ve heard of Derek, it's almost certainly because for a while he was an accidental celebrity on Twitter. He was just on the platform, doing his well-regarded but relatively obscure men’s fashion thing, slowly building his online presence, when the algorithm took hold of him and made him ubiquitous on the site, dropping him into the feeds of millions of people who had never shown any interest whatsoever in his subject. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2023:

Of all the changes at Twitter Inc. under Elon Musk so far, this might be the most unexpected: A California-based menswear writer, who weighs in on incorporating western-style wear into your wardrobe, and on his favorite Italian tailors, suddenly seems to be all over the platform.

The Twitter account @dieworkwear, run by Derek Guy, is popping up left and right in users’ timelines—even for those who don’t follow him. The phenomenon has befuddled users—and Mr. Guy himself.

Derek doesn't know why this happened. He didn't have a backroom deal with Elon Musk. It just happened. He became the “men's wear guy on Twitter.”I initially reached out to Derek not to have him on the podcast, but because I was trying to develop a story pitch on men's fashion in the age of Trump, and I wanted to see if I could pick his brain for ideas. It turned out he was already at work on a few different stories on different aspects of that topic, and it occurred to me that I could kill two birds with one podcast episode.

One of the articles we discuss in our conversation hasn’t run yet. The other, his Bloomberg story “The Evolution of the Alpha Male Aesthetic,” goes back into the history of