_A mere half-decade ago, menswear web sites were about as hard to find as a rap album called I’m Gay. Yes, it’s a brave new world: fire up your Tumblr dashboard right now and tell us you’re not looking at Nick Wooster’s mustache. In recent years, hundreds of menswear bloggers have helped teach a generation of sons with dad-jeans fathers how to dress along the way. Or at least, which American-made shoe brands to buy on eBay. _
_ In the early days of the menswear Internet, the conversation was born on Style.com, message boards such as Ask Andy About Clothes, and on streetwear and sneaker-centric sites such as Hypebeast—not to mention a little blog by a future GQ photographer you may have heard about. To celebrate approximately ten years of obsessive cataloging, we strapped on our double monks, rolled up our raw denim, and hit the blogosphere to track down the men who have made #menswear our favorite trending topic. _
Michael Williams (blogger, A Continuous Lean): I remember not having anywhere good to go. I remember when Style.com got their updated URL to include "men," and that was like a big thing. I don’t think, until 2008, [men’s style] was taken seriously.
Jesse Thorn (Photo: Noe Montes)
Jesse Thorn (blogger, Put This On): The one that I most enjoyed reading was A Suitable Wardrobe. In the early years of his blog, in 2006, what he was doing was taking the canon of basic classic menswear information that you might find in an Alan Flusser book or a G. Bruce Boyer book and putting it into blog form.
Will Boehlke (blogger, A Suitable Wardrobe): The Sartorialist was around. Styleforum wasn’t very popular then and Ask Andy was the leading board. I was a, gosh, I don’t remember the term—one of the guys who was keeping order on Ask Andy, and it was pretty obvious that there wasn’t a source for men to get information about classic men’s clothing. I just started writing about it.
**Michael Williams: **I knew Scott when he first started The Sartorialist. He did a little interview with me in 2006 on there. I went back and re-read it, I was talking about made in America then. I had that obsession.
**Michael Bastian (Designer): **We were lucky in a way because we were new when that whole phenomenon was new. So we’ve known nothing else. The Sartorialist, he became a buddy of ours. He actually shot one of our lookbooks really early on, that kind of started the whole thing.
**Mordechai Rubinstein (blogger, Mister Mort): **My Google, my everything was eBay, so I never really went online that much until I heard [of] The Sartorialist.
**Scott Schuman (blogger, The Sartorialist): **There was a blog called English Cut, by an English Savile Row tailor [Thomas Mahon] who was talking about his experience. What I thought would be great with blogs was this ability to live vicariously through other people.
**Lawrence Schlossman (blogger, Sartorially Inclined, How to Talk to Girls at Parties): **Men.Style.com was probably the first thing that I knew of and was exposed to. That was the first thing I saw on the Internet that spoke to me as a straight guy looking for information about menswear on the Internet. The main minds behind that were Tyler Thoreson and Josh Peskowitz—you had two guys who were speaking to an audience directly that seemed to have been neglected.
**Josh Peskowitz (Style Director, Gilt MAN): **My first magazine job was for a magazine here in New York called the Fader. I was the fashion person. They launched Fader.com and I was like, "What, are you kidding me, I’m not going to write anything for the web." But we started writing those things and they did get some response. While I was [at Men.Style.com], we went from writing one article a day to having more of a blog format.
**Cory Ohlendorf (editor-in-chief, Valet): **There were smaller sites starting to populate, Uncrate, Selectism, which were more product-driven sites.
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Lawrence Schlossman
**Lawrence Schlossman: **It’s funny because a lot of people ask me now about forums. A lot of times, I’ll Google an obscure menswear thing or a technical term and the only thing that exists are these guys talking about it on Styleforum. I’m lurking there, I’m not a member, I’m not registered for any of those forums. I never was on the Hypebeast forums, which predates a lot of this stuff. [I] was never on Superfuture, was never on Ask Andy.
**Derek Guy (blogger, Die, Workwear!, Put This On): **Anyone who writes about men’s clothing probably has an account on Styleforum. I was reading it in 2007 or so.
**Jesse Thorn: **Styleforum is interesting because it was a place where there was legitimate discussion of what you might call "fashion-y" menswear, and a legitimate discussion of what you might call "classic" menswear. Neither of those is a perfect description but it encompasses both selvedge denim and neckties. And that is unique because when I started Interneting, there was Superfuture, which was so, so masturbatory. It was jeans and high-fashion sneakers and things like that.
**Michael Williams: **Superfuture, I wasn’t into that, I wasn’t a streetwear guy, Ask Andy, especially because I worked at J.Press, I would spend a good amount of time in there. They were all obsessed with J.Press. Mark McNairy went on there and then got kicked off. Mark’s kind of brash—he went on there and caused this uproar, just arguing with all these people. He started calling everyone names or something, I don’t remember exactly. They banned him. It was really funny at the time.
_In 2008, the American heritage movement began to take off. Everywhere you looked— or, at least, in some very specific zip codes—men were sporting flannel, Filson, and Red Wings. And with the arrival of the heritage movement, along with it came a fleet of bloggers ruthlessly covering the scene. Thanks to the recession, "buy less, buy better," became a blogosphere mantra. _
**Michael Williams: **I think I started [ACL], on December 26, [2007]. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, to be honest. I was in Ohio at my parents’ house for the holidays, bored. It was snowing like crazy.
**Derek Guy: **Within 2008, there was a massive bloom in blogs and I think everybody was writing at Blogspot. Also around that time, the prep revival—Christian at Ivy Style, Unabashedly Prep.
**F.E. Castleberry (blogger, Unabashedly Prep): **I started Unabashedly Prep two and a half, three years ago. It felt like when I got there, I was pretty new. In the beginning stages, I was able to interview Sid Mashburn, he allowed me to photograph his shop—that was one of the first pieces of content that went live on my site.
When I started there was a big Americana movement. The prep style benefited from that as well as the Ivy and trad styles. American workwear, there was definitely this wave a lot of the sites focusing on [it] benefited from. Michael Williams is one of those.
**Michael Williams: **I have to admit that it was good for me but part of the reason why my thing worked is that that was going on already. I didn’t invent the heritage thing or the made in America thing. I think that blogs magnified all these trends a lot.
**Bob Clark (Vice President, Alden Shoe Company): **I think there’s some influence from the Japanese market. Japanese retailers and designers were early in connecting with and expressing a great appreciation for established American brands.
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Cory Ohlendorf (Photo: F.E. Castleberry)
**Cory Ohlendorf: **That was really beneficial to menswear because it focused on pieces made with integrity, so it helped educate guys, it helped illuminate the process of how you got a really well-made shoe or the steps it takes to build a really well-fitting jacket.
**Jesse Thorn: **The streetwear crowd went from being concerned solely about intangibles—hype, aesthetics and trends— to having concern about "craft." And so when that started happening, that brought a lot of people toward a more classic aesthetic, where there were these people waiting for them on the Internet. [Laughs]
I think that Michael was the guy who said, it is possible to create a men’s fashion/lifestyle blog that is something other than hot new sneaker releases for 19-year-olds or, "Let’s all dress like Cary Grant." Something in between. And that was, I think, the thing that spawned 1,000 imitators.
**Derek Guy: **Starting in 2009 or so, Jesse starts Put This On, Lawrence starts Sartorially Inclined, and those are my two favorite blogs.
**Lawrence Schlossman: **When I originally started blogging, I was blogging about music, specifically rap. I had tried to get traction with this little joint I had and it wasn’t happening, so at that point, I had been reading ACL and Valet… I thought, "Let me give this a try," so I shut down the music site and leaped over and haven’t looked back ever since.
Valet for a long time has been a huge vehicle of the blogs. And because Valet is so professional and awesome-looking, when they were supporting a lot of guys like myself, it gave us a co-sign. For a lot of people, one of their big blog moments was getting on Valet’s morning report.
**Cory Ohlendorf: **We really make an effort to constantly be looking for new sites. There’s 75-100 sites that I’ll check out a day.
_As the popularity (and personalities) of these sites grew, an industry began to take notice. And like the Alan Freed rock ’n’ roll radio payola scandal of the 1950s, and, in more recent times, Mommy bloggers with thriving audiences, menswear labels learned how to, uh, sway the correspondents driving the conversation: Free shit! _
**Will Boehlke: **In 2008, people didn’t pay that much attention. Advertisers were starting to come around but—I think when the industry started to see how much traffic would come out of favorable reports, it became a lot easier to get access.
**Kevin Harter (Vice President and Men’s Fashion Director, Bloomingdale’s): **I know from our own media buys in the last year and a half, we’ve started advertising on blogs and web sites. Even though it’s still a small subscriber base, in a lot of cases, we have definitely seen a nice return on that.
**Eunice Lee (Designer, Unis): **As a small company, having my own web store, all of these things, you just realize how important it is to be accessible. …There is so much [more] information about smaller brands out there than there has been since I started 11 years ago.
**Cory Ohlendorf: **These brands, they started paying attention probably in 2009, 2010, when they realized there was a conversation happening. It took a little while to build up that steam but now it’s so easy to speak to whoever we need to, to get the kind of samples we need.
"My father didn’t teach me how to dress. Which left me severely sartorially disabled. I remember being in my mid-20s and not knowing the difference between a peak and a notch lapel on a jacket. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio—my dad wore sweatshirts."—Michael Williams
**Lawrence Schlossman: **When Lands’ End Canvas launched, they sent me a bunch of stuff to have and review. Whether or not you had bloggers taking it into their own hands and saying, "Hey, I could help you out," or the other way around and brands pushing it, it shows that these big companies realize there was a lot at stake in fostering these good relationships with bloggers. It wasn’t just [reserved] for the big boys like ACL or Street Etiquette who have huge audiences. I definitely remember at some point being like, "Oh, damn, anyone could get free shit."
**Michael Williams: **I joke that menswear blogging now is second only to mommy blogging in terms of people trying to fucking scam companies out of free stuff. Every dude is like, "I can start a blog and scam Gant out of a fucking woven shirt."
**Michael Bastian: **We tried to quickly weed through that. It’s not enough to just give us a big wet kiss every now and then. There’s got to be something behind it, there’s got to be some reflection and analysis. You can tell who takes it seriously.
**Derek Guy: **I had a very, very small company contact me when I was doing Die, Workwear!, and that was amazing to me. They were like Etsy kind of stuff. When I started writing for Put This On, bigger companies contacted me to do reviews and I realized, you write about a product for Put This On, it shows up on the front page of Google.
Soon brands themselves launched their own blogs, with retailers ranging from Brooks Brothers to Gilt Groupe developing editorial voices and hiring menswear writers. In 2011, digital men’s retailers such as [GQ partner] Gilt’s Park Bond and Mr. Porter emerged as dependable, innovative shopping tools. A generation of men searching for new ways to learn—and geek out—about style now had new options.
**Cory Ohlendorf: **It makes sense with these ecommerce sites to help bring that context to their setting. You want to see how you might wear it or how you might incorporate it with everything you already have. The more people you have getting into the space, it just raises the bar for everybody. People like Mr. Porter or Park Bond have really sharp editors.
**Derek Guy: **Brooks Brothers’ site, it’s trying to be like a blog that anybody would start up.
**Kevin Harter: **[In] most of the stores, men’s is some of the strongest trending business out there. Men have been encouraged to change how they dress – tailored clothing, dress shirts and ties. They’re dressing differently than they did five years ago. Is it as big as the women’s? No, but are we closing the gap.
**Nick Wooster (Fashion Advisor, Gilt MAN): **As the roles of specialty stores and major stores are changing, the blogs have come in and fill that void in a new and different way. You’re actually getting information for information’s sake. I think it’s just totally changed the dynamic of how guys shop.
**Tommy Ton (GQ contributor, Photographer, Jak Jil): **It’s just better than going into a store and having to deal with a salesperson. You can learn from a visual perspective.
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_Michael Bastian and Josh Peskowitz
(Photo: PatrickMcMullan.com)_
**Michael Bastian: **There are these guys in their 20s, straight guys in their 20s, who are very obsessive about their clothes. It’s so fascinating to me because I never realized this group of guys existed, who follow designers and clothing like a lot of guys might follow baseball. And it’s not an affront to their masculinity at all.
**Scott Schuman: **I think guys are feeling more comfortable. I think what helps is, these [blogs] are done by real guys, [readers] have a sense of who they are. It makes them more comfortable getting advice from bloggers.
**Will Boehlke: **It was Alan Flusser who pointed out, a whole generation of men in the ’70s stopped getting dressed, so they didn’t teach their children how to get dressed. More and more people have found, "Oh, I can go read about this stuff."
**Michael Williams: **My father didn’t teach me how to dress. Which left me severely sartorially disabled. I remember being in my mid-20s and not knowing the difference between a peak and a notch lapel on a jacket. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio—my dad wore sweatshirts.
**Lawrence Schlossman: **The most common question I would get is people wanting to know, "Where do I start?" And then other thing is, "Where do I get the most amazing thing—fill in the blank—for really, really cheap?" Even right now, there’s like 2,000 questions sitting that I’m never going to answer. It’s just impossible.
**Jesse Thorn: **People kept emailing me and saying, "I have a wedding in two days and I need a tudo, and I want it to be less than $300 and I want it to be perfect. "And I would say, "That is how you end up with a shitty tudo."
**Mordechai Rubinstein: **I get emails from 76-year-old men, asking me what type of hat they should buy, what type of haberdashery to go to. The emails that I get are what keep me alive, they wake me up in the morning [to] keep blogging. It’s insane. It’s a lot more older dudes. I’m shocked they even have emails.
I think a big problem with these blogs, they’re making rules and breaking rules before they know what the rules are. It’s not okay to mix a pattern with a pattern with a pattern. It’s never okay to wear a tie over a tank top like Avril Lavigne.
**Aliotsy Andrianarivo (blogger, This Fits): **What’s challenging to people who are just starting out [is] trying to pull off [Brunello] Cucinelli in a week—you see it in a lookbook and you want to buy all the pieces. I had a certain degree of that starting out. The blogosphere can encourage that.
**Josh Peskowitz: **On Men.Style.com there was a younger generation of brands that we championed—people like Rag Bone, Patrik Ervell, Billy Reid—that we gave a lot of credence to. Those brands form a baseline for kids doing the blogs and doing the Tumblrs.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2009, Men.Style.com was folded into GQ.com.]
**Michael Williams: **A lot of guys were really into all the Bastian stuff and especially the stuff he’s doing for Gant. Isaia is one that’s more obsessed about now. Alden’s managed to worked its way through all of these different trends. I know for a fact Isaia is not doing this on purpose, it’s just happening to them. And some of the brands are doing a good job to encourage it, like Gant, and then some are oblivious like Alden.
**Bob Clark: **[As] a function of the exposure that we’ve received through blogs… a younger consumer has found us. We decided early on that… the best approach for us was simply to stay out of it and let those conversations develop as they would naturally. And in part by staying away from it, we get to concentrate on what we think we do best, which is just make shoes.
**Josh Peskowitz: **You could say the double monkstrap shoe is a blog phenomenon.
**Derek Guy: **People were really excited about double monks on Styleforum for a while. I think that translates to blogs.
**Will Boehlke: **Double monks? Only if you wear ’em unbuckled. That was a joke.
**Michael Williams: **Maybe I’m out of touch, but I never liked the whole double monk thing. I think a lot of this stuff has gotten out of control. At the Pop Up Flea [in 2009], some dude showed up in a henley and Carhartt overalls, seriously, with like a bandana in his back pocket. That shit looks weird at a truck stop in rural Pennsylvania. You can’t be wearing that shit in SoHo. Now it’s all these Italian unstructured garment-washed jackets.
Lawrence is like the leader of all these little things. He’s the one that gets on bracelets and shit. I never subscribed to that either, the whole bracelet thing. I’ll leave that to Man Repeller, I’m good on wearing 10 bracelets. I’m not at fucking summer camp.
**Lawrence Schlossman: **I think the age difference in bloggers determines how susceptible they are to experimenting style-wise. An older guy, such as Michael, has had more time behind the wheel and knows pretty quickly when he has absolutely no interest in something. I wear them because I saw Kanye West wear them at Coachella.
Just kidding, I wear a few—10 is a pretty fucking ridiculous amount—but all of them were gifts from friends who were traveling. I’ve got a few representatives from India and Sweden.
_As trends developed and the blogosphere continued to expand, a new player entered the game in 2007: Tumblr, the teen-friendly blogging platform that became home to long-form sites such as Put This On and Die, Workwear! and hundreds of reblog-fueled inspiration-board pages alike. Tumblr dashboards quickly became full of borrowed photography and iPhone shots of young bloggers on a budget. _
**Aliotsy Andrianarivo: **For a while there, Tumblr was very much the little kid at the table. If you were a serious blogger, you’re on Blogspot or you’re on Wordpress or you had your own domain. And I think that’s shifted: if they didn’t have a Tumblr, they started a Tumblr. It lowers the barriers to entry for getting a post out there. What added the respect level to the Tumblr is guys like Jesse and Derek, where they treated Tumblr as more than just an image board.
**Jesse Thorn: **Put This On has always been on Tumblr. And it’s been really great for us. But there certainly are times when I wish we weren’t, not just when Tumblr seemed to be down one day a week. It’s easy to reblog an image that you don’t own and it’s difficult to write an article or take compelling editorial photographs. One of the reasons why I hired Derek Guy to work with me on Put This On was that on his blog, he was actually having ideas.
**Tommy Ton: **I find it most validating when I see my photos go on Tumblr. That actually just reassures me that I’m actually doing something right. I’m a Tumblr addict myself.
**Scott Schuman: **I just choose not to think about all the people stealing the photographs, what can you do? I’m honored that the photographs mean enough that they want to use them. I try to live a positive life and so I just try to think of it that way.
**Lawrence Schlossman: **I think Tumblr more than anything else has empowered a younger generation to start building their taste. The people that I’m seeing on Tumblr that I’m meeting, I do see them getting younger and younger. I don’t think we’re going to have a Tavi-like prophet blogging about menswear at 11 or 15, but I do see the median age is getting younger and younger.
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F.E. Castleberry
**F.E. Castleberry: **Most of the people on Tumblr are teenagers. So there’s a lot of junk out there.
**Michael Williams: **I think there are two types of bloggers basically, now. People that are on Tumblr and people that are not on Tumblr. Tumblr is its own little ecosystem, it’s pretty amazing. I also think Tumblr is very problematic in terms of trying to monetize a web site. Having a lot of Tumblr followers doesn’t mean jack shit when you’re trying to serve ads and make money.
**Lawrence Schlossman: **I resisted [Tumblr] because I thought it was an easy way out. For a long time, [How To Talk to Girls at Parties] was just an image board and a way to expose more people to Sartorially Inclined, but because I got in at just the right moment, I was answering a ton of questions, giving out free style advice that I guess people thought was good, that soon ballooned into its own monster. It’s the forefront thing, it’s what people who work with me attach my name to.
**Jesse Thorn: **I like reading the Tumblogs of people who are sort of chronicling their ascent to power rather than shouting from on high what’s on-trend, what’s off-trend, what’s having a moment this season. A lot of people in that community are just developing an interest in these things. I think that’s really cool.
**Aliotsy Andrianarivo: **Something I’m seeing Tumblr is really good for is the What I Wore Today bloggers. Those are the blogs that are most interesting right now, the guys who don’t have a pass to a fashion show or don’t work in fashion. They definitely have their own distinctive flavor or personal style but have a nod toward classic menswear. They’re able to do it with the mall brands or online shops or thrift stores that most men have access to.
_For all its amateur community, Tumblr soon became home to a number of budding—and baffled—Fashion Week-attending menswear icons. _
**Michael Williams: **Certain people have been singled out and obsessed over. Nick’s one of those people.
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Nick Wooster (Photo: PatrickMcMullan.com)
**Nick Wooster: **First, I was shocked, and then immediately flattered. I did not understand why there was interest in such a thing.
**Scott Schuman: **Nick [has] an extreme style. He’s not on the fence.
**Lawrence Schlossman: **It’s kind of awesome to see a new crop of guys that can inspire other guys. I think that for the longest time the biggest issue that the industry was having as a whole was a lack of icons. That’s why you see things like Mad Men and Steve McQueen, even those resurgences now. We’re looking for icons.
**Nick Wooster: **It continues to somewhat baffle me. But at the same time, if it’s me or if it’s anyone, it’s good for menswear as an industry. There’s a lot of people who benefit from that exposure.
**Aliotsy Andrianarivo: **I think it’s kind of neat. Nick Wooster has a similar build to me so it’s interesting to see what he does. I don’t think I’d necessarily wear everything that he has but you see someone who has a master’s grasp of texture and proportion and you can learn something from that, even if you don’t necessarily mimic his style.
**Tommy Ton: **I think what’s so great about them in comparison to celebrities is they’re able to filter trends or looks that are seen in magazines or on the runway but they wear it in such an interesting way. They have so much fun with fashion and I think that’s inspired people. It’s a pleasure to be able to photograph them.
_Because every great blogging movement needs its satirist, 2010 saw the launch of Fuck Yeah Menswear: the Hipster Runoff of the menswear movement. He (or she? Them?) promptly got a book deal after drawing thousands of readers to impenetrably inside-baseball meme-speak poems. _
**Fuck Yeah Menswear (blogger, Fuck Yeah Menswear): **My favorite blog style trend has been people adopting slang that I created—it only reinforces how heavy in the streets I am.
**Lawrence Schlossman: **A lot of these dudes who are nerds about menswear are nerds about hip-hop, too. It’s just a way of bringing two worlds together. Not to mention, it’s hilarious to hear people use ’90s rap terms when discussing a very beautiful sportcoat or an expensive umbrella. I think that’s why Fuck Yeah Menswear is doing very well.
**Derek Guy: **The fact that Fuck Yeah Menswear got a book deal is pretty incredible. That’s pretty amazing to me. I don’t know how that book’s going to do.
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**Cory Ohlendorf: **When it first came out, I think we were all sort of taken aback. Everybody loved it, I don’t think there was any ill will. Once we got name-checked, we knew we were in the consciousness.
**Lawrence Schlossman: **Some people think it’s me, I have my own suspicions about who it might be. I think at this point, you just appreciate what it is.
**Cory Ohlendorf: **You hear names floating around here and there, I’m not really sure who it is. Or maybe it’s a group of people.
**Fuck Yeah Menswear: **I’m not a blogger, somebody lied. I am a full-time gangster who goes where the paper is. I keep shit secretive because there are always gonna be snakes in the grass.
**Jesse Thorn: **I was talking to a friend of mine, Andrew Noz, who does the blog Cocaine Blunts and Hip-Hop Tapes—I was trying to explain that to him and why it frankly makes me uncomfortable [laughs]. As someone who grew up listening to hip-hop and is from the inner city— I’m obviously very white, but I come by my hip-hop enthusiasm legitimately. It feels like a form of race play and I don’t like it. I actually grew up in a neighborhood where I had to be concerned about the colors that I wore and the way that I dressed because it was important to me to not be seen as the potential source of set tripping.
_ "Men’s fashion doesn’t move as fast. Men’s is more about subtlety and the fit and women’s is more about cut and newness. I like that difference—I hope men are never moving that fast."—Scott Schuman _
_ Crispy or not, in 2011, the menswear blogosphere continues to grow and influence. But can it crash the Man Repeller’s arm party or will it settle for a few more well-dressed men? _
**Eunice Lee: **It’s gotten bigger and bigger. At the same time, I think that you can be cool all day long on blogs but you still have to be legitimized as a brand in terms of mainstream media. You can’t just do one.
**Lawrence Schlossman: **This past Fashion Week in New York, Tumblr downgraded the amount of people they took from 24 to 20, but they took more menswear bloggers. Which I think shows that we’re dealing with something that’s kind of a big deal.
J.Crew doesn’t look the same as it looked four years ago. Look at a line like Lands’ End Canvas. Would that even exist if it weren’t for blogs and their readers being super-interested in this stuff?
**Michael Williams: **The way that women buy luxury handbags and shit, there’s no parallel for that in men. What could it be? Like, watches? That’s still pretty tough.
**Scott Schuman: **Men’s fashion doesn’t move as fast. Men’s is more about subtlety and the fit and women’s is more about cut and newness. I like that difference—I hope men are never moving that fast.
**Tommy Ton: **I think the way the men’s market has been rapidly growing because of Tumbling and blogging and all that, it could be on par with women’s in a couple years. When I speak to a lot of buyers, they tell me how business has really boomed for them.
**Eunice Lee: **The thing that men’s blogs do that women’s blogs don’t is, it’s kind of nerdier. Guys actually do homework on the Internet—if they see something a couple more times, then I think they’re more comfortable with wanting to try something out. No guy wants to just go out on a limb on his own. [Laughs]
**Cory Ohlendorf: **Unlike four to five years ago, a man today is so much happier to buy a pair of beautiful, well-made shoes and know that they’re only going to get better and more comfortable and look more lived in with every year. That’s the way he wants to dress now.
We launched in late 2008 so we’re not incredibly old by any means but we feel like anybody who would be interested in Valet would’ve found Valet by now. But each month, we grow between 15 and 20%.
**Bob Clark: **These discussions aren’t about promotion, they’re not about advertising, there’s some meat on the bone. There’s conversation about how products are put together. And about not only the features but the quality of workmanship, the quality of materials, the essence of what a product is. So the generation that is moving into a state of life where they’re looking at products like ours is getting a great education in what to look for, and so we’re very happy about that.
**Jesse Thorn: **We did an interview with Alan Flusser that got blogged on Hypebeast, right? [Laughs] That would’ve been laughable seven years ago. I know because I get emails from guys who tell me that their lives have been transformed, and that we are doing that for many people. And that’s something we’re proud of.
**Michael Williams: **I think it’s going to get a lot bigger actually. I think bigger people are going to come into this now and you’re going to see, in the next 12 months, some serious people come in and make investments in the men’s style universe online. I think it’s only going to grow from there.
**Jesse Thorn: **I would like to see Andre 3000’s menswear blog. I think there are a lot of people with a lot of knowledge who are just starting to get engaged with new media. My hope is, as people get more comfortable with the medium, we’ll hear more from whoever it is. Bruce Boyer. Alan Flusser.
**Derek Guy: **There will always be someone who’s willing to hit reblog.
