If you use Twitter regularly and have any interest in fashion, you may be familiar with the work of Derek Guy, a prolific user who posts popular threads about menswear under the handle @dieworkwear. In fact, even if you don’t have any interest in fashion, you’ve probably seen his tweets, as well.
In the last week, numerous Twitter users have described seeing Guy’s tweets incessantly promoted to their home page. Their posts usually describe him as “the menswear guy,” citing his threads on fast fashion, tailoring and the history of menswear trends.
Guy, who has written about menswear for outlets like The Washington Post, said his omnipresence on the For You page is a mystery to him, too.
“Around the middle of January I started to notice all these comments on my tweets that were like, ‘Why am I seeing this? I don’t even care about clothes,’” Guy said. “These people weren’t following me and they weren’t responding to something that someone they do follow had retweeted from me, or anything like that. Then I searched ‘menswear guy’ after I saw someone use the term and saw all these tweets about me.”
Guy said the experience has been disorienting. He was anxious, at first, that he had done something wrong or that people were angry at him for his tweets showing up on their timeline. He hadn’t paid to promote his tweets or done anything other than continue to post threads on various fashion topics, as he’ has’s been doing since 2011. He’s had no communication from Twitter around why his tweets have suddenly found themselves on so many timelines. Glossy reached out to Twitter but received no response. The company reportedly has lost most of its communication staff since Elon Musk took over.
It seems Guy’s presence is just a fluke of the platform’s algorithm combined with its newly-instituted For You page. The page was set to the default option for Twitter users on January 10, leading many to start seeing Guy’s posts on their feeds without even realizing they were on the recommended tab.
Twitter has never been the best platform for fashion content. Instagram’s visual nature makes it a much more natural fit for fashion brands and influencers. The chaos after the Musk takeover has only made Twitter more toxic for brands, with many, like Balenciaga and Gigi Hadid, deleting their accounts in the post-Musk takeover. And there aren’t fashion influencers on Twitter the way there are on Instagram.
“If you’re in the fashion space, even as a consumer, then I think Instagram makes more sense,” Guy said. “I just like Twitter. I have less anxiety about writing a tweet thread than I do about writing a blog post. And I only just recently got on Instagram.”
Guy’s content focus is mainly on his Twitter and his blog, the latter of which hosts ads from menswear brands like Besnard and Frank Clegg. (Guy declined to answer if writing is his full-time job.) While Guy’s newfound fame — he went from 50,000 followers on Twitter in November to over 100,000 now — has yet to have a significant impact on his blog, it has led to interest from the wider fashion world. He said he’s started to get DMs from brands, including an invite to Loro Piana’s upcoming show, though he won’t be attending.
“I don’t really do fashion shows,” he said.
Instead, he said he’s just going to keep focusing on his writing, both freelance and on his blog, “Die, Workwear.” And yes, he’ll keep posting on Twitter.
