The Clothes People Love (and Hate) on Men

The long-awaited results of the men's fashion survey!

Heads up, yesterday I announced the launch of personals ads that I’ll be running on this Substack! If you’re single and interested, the instructions for what/how to submit are here. Also, if you’re open to filling out another anonymous survey, I have one on relationships and work (anyone 18+ in America can fill it out.)

Well, it’s finally here! A few weeks ago, I asked the good men of Substack, Twitter, and Bluesky to submit photos of their outfits for the men’s fashion survey, to get an idea of how different men’s apparel are perceived by different people. A while ago, I did a female fashion survey, but because I selected all the images (and because all the images were from online shopping sites) I think there were some problems with them: mostly, the fact that a great deal of them are things I personally have worn, from brands I know, and as a consequence of that, there was a lot of pink. For the men’s survey I wanted to highlight the outfits of real men, instead of perusing a few men’s fashion websites.

This time, things are going to be a bit different, because I worked with

Lyman Stone

to collect the data from over 2,000 respondents and analyze it. Lyman is the Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, the Director of Research for the forecasting firm Demographic Intelligence, and a Substacker. He, his wife, and their 3 daughters live in Kentucky. You probably didn’t think of him as the guy who would be analyzing data about men’s fashion, but he contains multitudes. Subscribe to him to see more of his great work!

Anyway, let’s hear it for the amazing men who submitted! Also, regardless of your opinions of their clothing, please be courteous and respectful- it takes courage to put yourself out there, especially for your clothes to be anonymously rated by thousands of people.

You might notice a few things about these outfits: some of them are from the same guys. Actually, some of them are from my husband (notably, 25, 26, and 27.) You might be wondering, “What gives, CHH? You didn’t accept my photo, but you accepted three of your husband’s?”

Allow me to explain.

Basically, the goal of this survey was to get a wide variety of outfits that didn’t all look the same. Most of the images I couldn’t select were either poor image quality (the vast majority didn’t clearly show footwear, or were taken in badly-lit environments), or looked nearly identical to another outfit I had already chosen. It was pretty hard to find risky or colorful outfits. I got a ton of submissions that were basically just “dark pants and a shirt.” That’s obviously fine—I didn’t want every image to be polarizing. But because my husband has taken some fashion risks, I decided to include a few of his most out-there outfits. I put out my feelers out many times to try and find outfits that were even more unusual, but I couldn’t get many that had good photo quality.

Anyway, now that I’m done apologizing for everything as I always do, let’s get into the results, courtesy of

Lyman Stone

’s excellent analysis. If you want to read on, now is the perfect time to take advantage of my week-long tariff offset sale (the biggest sale on annual subscriptions I’ve ever done- 40% off annual subscriptions.) I’m not 100% sure, but I don’t think it works if you upgrade from a current monthly subscription, I believe you have to be a new subscriber for it to work.