Die, Workwear: "This is how to look better in your 20s and 30s"

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
If you're a young man in your 20s and 30s, and you want to be more confident, this episode is for you. And it's gonna be a little strange. If you saw this headline, if you saw this title, you're gonna think, why on earth is this happening on a business podcast? Today's episode is with Die Work Wear. Die Work Wear is the username of a person who's gone incredibly viral on Twitter. He has over a million followers, and he talks about men's fashion. I saw this guy pop up last year, and it kinda changed my life, because he taught me about dress and how dressing a certain way, it gives a huge amount of confidence. And the problem is that you don't try to dress nice, because you don't really know the rules. And so I thought it'd be fun to talk to Derek about his rise, so how he got huge and built the business, but also some practical tips on how to dress better, and what that means for your life, and what that means for your confidence. So give this episode a listen, and I'll talk to you in a little bit. I think the reason why you're blowing up right now, I'll give you my opinion, and maybe you could give me your opinion. But I care how I look, and I've always cared about that, but I never really knew the rules. Basically, when you don't know the rules of something, you feel not confident, and you just revert back to like, well, I'm just going to do the lazy thing of wearing athleisure or boring clothes. But you have this line that you repeat constantly, which is clothing is a social language, and you kind of have taught people how to speak it, which kind of gives confidence, and it makes your clothing feel like armor, but also you're dressing like the person you want to be, and you're speaking the language of the people you want to speak with and kind of what you want to behave like. And I think this is why millions of men have liked you, because you're giving them confidence and teaching them the language.

**Derek Guy** (1:45)
I do think of clothing as social language, and I've always thought of it in that sense, because, you know, if you grew up anytime before the internet, you know, you may have been part of some social group around a hobby or an interest, like you were a skater, or you're into punk music or whatever. And everyone I knew dressed a certain way to communicate an identity, like they were a jock or they were a nerd or whatever. And there was always rules around that look. Even if no one wrote a book and spelled it out for you, you kind of knew that this was the look. And everyone kind of conformed to the look of their social group and identity, and it kind of broadcasted a message.
And I think over time, I've just kind of taken that idea and talked about how it's also used in classic tailoring or, you know, techwear or whatever is the aesthetic genre. People are using dress to communicate something. And even people who dress in ways that is subconscious, that they think they don't care about clothes, they still kind of dress according to their socioeconomic class. I bring up this example often. There was a moment in the tech industry in the early 2000s where the hoodies and jeans uniform was a way to signal, I don't care about clothes. I'm like the whiz kid, you know, kind of hacker that's reshaping the economy. All I care is about meritocracy and skills. But it just so happens that over time within that industry, everyone started to also dress the same. So to some degree, people are at least conscious of what is the look within their group. And they were careful to not deviate too far from it because they want to signal that they belong. There's an article that I often mention on Twitter and sometimes in interviews. The author's name is Carlos, but I can't remember his last name. But he wrote an article called Inside the Mirrortocracy. Mirror like looking into the mirror and the autocracy. And his article was about how even in the tech industry where people say they don't care about clothes, everyone mirrors each other and clothes do play a part because if you showed up to a job interview for the tech industry and you wore a three piece suit, people assume that you don't fit in and they will read something into your clothes. So to some degree, clothes do matter.