Fashion as fandom, explained by Ryan Shaw

I met Ryan Shaw many years and many eras ago, back when I was knee-deep in photography, cooking, and styling cookbooks. I don’t do that anymore, but Ryan once offered to help chop a mountain of onions and we have been friends ever since.

The thing I love about Ryan is that he dives deep. Deep into his own interests, deep into yours if you are his friend, and deep into whatever else orbits his world. He is one of the few people I can talk with for hours, knowing he will understand every reference. On top of that, he has the best sense of style of anyone I know. His Instagram bio reads, “Somewhere between bummy chic and menswear but make it tall.” The only tragic part is that I am about 15–17 inches shorter than him, so borrowing is out of the question.

So of course I wanted to get his take on fashion. I knew he would have one, and I knew he would be able to walk us through it as a fandom. If you have been reading Huge Fan, you know that I think a fan origin story is everything. Was it a social-first experience, or a bolt-of-lightning? Did you discover it in isolation, or connect with others right away? These are the questions I am always asking, and Ryan’s story hits them perfectly.

It feels right to have one of my closest friends take over Huge Fan as the very first contributor. I hope you enjoy his piece as much as I did.

There is a semi-famous (to a very specific niche) interview where Tyler the Creator talks about how our tastes and what we like are informed by our reference points. This is apt in many areas, but perhaps none more so than in the world and orbit of men’s fashion and men in fashion, which has somehow taken over as the dominating conversation in the industry.

The fandom of fashion, at an outsized vantage point, works perhaps more in reverse compared to the standard fandom. The barrier to entry is quite high in comparison to your favorite music artist or TV show (cost, exclusivity, size, etc.), and the fashion world is still incredibly fraught with controversy. Let us set that aside for a moment.

I remember being in high school and discovering Pinterest and feeling like my mind was blown (insert meme of woman wide-eyed with vortex clouds swirling).

Pinterest was new to the world, not just new to me. (And yes, Gen Z, if you are reading this, I was born in the 1900s and Gutenberg had just figured out the printing press, and our Zeniths were just starting to come in technicolor.) It was a great tool for discovery before you really knew what you were looking for. I grew up in suburban Ohio but was blessed enough to travel, so I knew there was more out there than “mall” fashion. I just didn’t know where to find it. Which leads me to my first point:

I was looking at men’s fashion on Pinterest in the late aughts. You can use your imagination. It was a lot of skinny jeans and slouchy beanies (which I still stand by).

So my first love within fashion was more about the items themselves, if that makes sense? I was engaging with the “idea” of, What if I wore that poncho and jean combo? Where would I find those items? My first reference points were, frankly, bad men’s style pins on Pinterest that I look back on and laugh at. But it meant that I cared more about the “product” than the person making the product.

It’s also in this first stage in any fandom, but especially in the fashion multiverse, where you are primarily just spending your time and not yet anything more. In the current era, you are probably doing a lot of scrolling and searching on social media. You might still be jumping on Pinterest. Maybe you’re flirting with the idea of the fandom, but you have not quite DTR’d. Which leads us down into the next stage.

From those early Pinterest images, which often didn’t have links attached (this was the Tumblr era where we just posted aesthetic photos for the sake of the aesthetic), I entered phase two: finding the brands. This is where you start to realize there is a world within the world you had no clue about.

I wasn’t finding a fashion poncho (not a rain poncho) at my local Hollister or Abercrombie. So where was I going to find it? You start digging around, Googling. You ask your most stylish friend (a little harder to do in the men’s fashion world, if I’m honest). And then you start to find that next layer of brands, the ones that used to only have stores in the biggest cities: Zara, AllSaints, Topshop, Uniqlo, etc.

Now you are finding pieces that look more like those Pinterest pins and a little different from what is available at the local Midwest mall. Again, this is about your reference points and entry way. I was interested in certain pieces (my fashion poncho, in this example) and wanted to find the brands that carried them. I knew there would be even more newness to discover inside those brands that would open me up to more ideas and more searching. A layered experience.

Within phase two, now you are starting to spend not just your time but also your money, but you are starting small. Maybe you are buying a few magazines at Barnes & Noble (this is the Midwest, people). Maybe you are buying a new t-shirt from one of your new brands. But you are not yet ready to pull the trigger on something bigger like a jacket. It is not just a financial decision but a question of commitment. Is your heart really into it as much as you thought?

We have moved past the flirting. We have DTR’d. Now you are wondering, Should we move in together? (Talk about layered experiences, we are giving you multi-tiered metaphors and through lines here, people, keep up.) The water is up to your knees. You have tasted the goods. And there is more…

This is also the phase of fandom where alienation can begin. Not always, but this is when the average person may lose interest. In fashion, you might start to dress radically differently from the people around you, and it feels less casual. That is not inherently good or bad, but people often lack interest in what they do not personally care about or understand.

Timing also matters when you enter a fandom. For me, “streetwear” was the dominating force when I came to menswear. I began spelunking through the depths of the menswear space, learning names like Supreme, The Hundreds, Pyrex, Chrome Hearts, along with people like Bobby Hundreds and James Jebbia.

If you have no clue who those people or brands are, that is the point. You have made it into the club only to realize there is a club inside the club.

At this stage, you are beginning to understand there are rules and guidelines, mostly unspoken, in order to be welcomed into the seventh circle of hell (I mean, fandom). In men’s fashion, I realized that to be a fan meant not just having your favorite brand but also knowing who the biggest movers and shakers were.

Once you have been diagnosed with stage three fandom, things get wacky. You are not casually dating anymore. You are in a full-on relationship. You are talking about engagement. It is about to be cuffing season, after all.

This whole thing is not just spending your time and money, it is consuming them. You have downloaded apps you did not know existed weeks ago. You are on subreddits so specific it feels like they were stripped from your marrow (if you are type A enough, you are managing the subreddit). You are spending differently. Before, it was anything from XYZ brand. Now, you want a specific jacket from the S/S 2004 collection. You are paying for Patreon podcasts and content only for the diehards. Outlook is bleak.

This is now where this particular fandom starts to horseshoe back around to the massive luxury brands that are loosely household names (but with your new lens and your new rules) and leads us to our men’s fashion fandom end destination.

This is where it really starts consuming your time.

And here we reach our ultimate destination. In men’s fashion, the fandom splinters, but none more importantly than this: are you a fan of the brand, or are you a fan of the designer?

As social media has become the dominating force (not like it was when I started, “OK boomer,” we all say in unison), the shift has come more toward people being fans of the person behind the brand rather than the brand itself. This causes wild discussion and in-fighting inside the community, especially with the constant musical chairs of top designers swapping roles at major fashion houses.

So are people fans of the designer, interpreting the essence of the brand they currently work for? Are they fans of the brand regardless of who is at the helm? Or are they, at bottom, fans of exclusivity, being in a club others are not part of? (This might feel like it is only in fashion, but talk to a Swiftie or a member of the BeyHive and you will get hit with a “You just don’t get it.”)

And this brings us full circle. Fandom, truly any fandom, is ultimately about reference points. It is about how and when you entered.

I entered during a time when the names did not matter and I did not care about brands. I set my heart on specific pieces and items, and that has held true. This is not to say there are not designers I feel connected to, but for me it has always been less about them, or even the brand name, than the garment itself.

It is like being a fan of a specific artist. Most of the time, the “era” or album you entered with is your favorite, even as you keep journeying deeper. And like any relationship (see what I did there), it is about commitment. Both for yourself and for everyone else watching to see if you are keeping up with the goings-on in your fandom. Ultimately, every fandom depends on this commitment to feed itself, both literally and metaphorically.

You can follow Ryan on Instagram here.