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For a guy who readily admits to wearing cargo shorts and graphic tees — the classic anti-fashion uniform — perhaps embarrassingly deep into his adult life, Michael Kristy cares a hell of a lot about clothes.
Kristy, the creative force behind the fashion vlog The Iron Snail, has built a blooming menswear business and fervent following on the back of his passion for apparel and footwear. Nearly 200,000 YouTube subscribers (and another 32,000 followers on Instagram) routinely dip into his long-form uploads, which primarily concern topics near and dear to the fashion-obsessed man’s heart: premium denim, cult workwear brands, the viral T-shirt from The Bear.
The transition from bad graphic tees and a young career in computer software to 1.2 million views on $880 Japanese denim isn’t as dramatic of a leap as it sounds. “I’m very into cameras and watches and everything like that, and clothing is even more in-depth than a lot of those things,” Kristy tells InsideHook. Some encouragement from a college roommate was enough to get him to hit the thrift stores to find some better pants, and it’s there he quickly realized that the intricacies of sartorial minutiae appealed to his detail-oriented sensibilities.
What began as a fascination with the origins of his second-hand finds — WWII peacoats, made-in-USA workwear — quickly spiraled into a full-time obsession with manufacturing and materials. For Kristy, part of a digital generation who had been routinely posting to YouTube (from basketball trickshots to weekly vlogs) for the better part of a decade, the natural conclusion to create a channel reviewing his rapidly increasing collection of raw denim and primo Americana pieces felt both obvious and natural.
“I thought, I’m basically spending all of my money buying leather jackets, raw denim, wool jackets. I think I could start a YouTube channel about this,” he says. “And when I get 100,000 subscribers — if I get 100,000 subscribers — hopefully there’ll be enough people that watch the channel that I can start building a clothing brand.”
You don’t even have to want the piece, but you’re like, I do want to know why that jacket’s built that way, why this pocket is for a radio or kidney warmers.
– Michael Kristy, creator of The Iron Snail
A social media personality hawking a clothing brand isn’t particularly unusual in today’s creator economy, but The Iron Snail is noticeably different than much of the style-focused content populating algorithm-curated feeds. Anyone who has scrolled Instagram and is even vaguely interested in clothes has most likely observed the mass of hard-posting, ‘fit pic-forward and often substanceless fashion influencers spewing sponsored posts and half-baked takes.
Kristy’s content is basically the opposite, skewing towards what he has coined as the “obsessive specs”: hyper-detailed, down-to-brass-tacks reviews of garments in videos that tend to be 10 to 15 minutes long. “The Iron Snail’s main focus is researching how clothing works and why specific materials and fibers are being used,” he explains. “I’m trying to go as deep as possible into the understanding of like, if I’m wearing a denim jacket, why is it made like this? What do these lines mean? What’s the functionality? I’m really fascinated in the logic that goes behind pieces of clothing. And I think a lot of people are as well, but I don’t think it’s something that really gets talked about a lot.”
The key to unlocking these answers? Lots and lots of research. Kristy routinely tracks down representatives of the brands he reviews, whether by DM or cold call, battering them with niche questions about hand stitching and tannery sourcing.
“I love to learn why Canada Goose says the Snow Mantra [jacket] is built for plane crashes,” he says. “You don’t even have to want the piece, but you’re like, I do want to know why that jacket’s built that way, why this pocket is for a radio or kidney warmers.”
The quality and depth of information available through The Iron Snail — which he considers both a business venture and an educational resource for others — with its hundreds of reliable reviews have slowly cemented Kristy as one of the foremost menswear experts on YouTube. But he, perhaps humbly, doesn’t necessarily consider himself an expert.
This is not to suggest that he isn’t confident in his ability to identify niche construction techniques or rare garments. As he wryly admits, “If you ask me a question [about clothes], I’m probably going to give you the right answer — 99% of the time you’re going to get a right answer. The other 1% of the time, I won’t give you an answer if I don’t know.”
Another difference between Kristy’s methodology and standard operating clickbait procedure: he rarely, if ever, offers definitive declarations about the clothing he reviews. “I really like the idea of doing something as honestly as possible. If you really like a Uniqlo T-shirt over, say, a Merz b. [Schwanen], it’s okay, that’s fine. I’m not going to say you should get the Merz b., because that’s a $90 T-shirt. Maybe you don’t want to pay that much. Or you can’t afford it. Or you just like the boxier fit of Uniqlo.”
Despite an approach that cuts against the algorithmic ideal, The Iron Snail has resonated with a select YouTube audience, enough to create an active community ravenous for Kristy’s unfettered thoughts on topics like Lululemon construction — and enough for him to parlay The Iron Snail into a full-time gig.
Kristy is quick to cite this audience as a blessing and a source of inspiration. Despite their reputation for toxicity, Kristy regularly checks the comments to see what his subscribers actually want to see from him, or what they think about recent videos. “The really valuable thing about comments is that you get to hear what people are saying,” he says. “Sometimes there are experts in the comments that say something that you’re like, whoa, I did not know that. I have to research that and check that out. Other times you get awesome suggestions. Sometimes you even get nice [comments].”
It’s this relationship with his viewers that spurred Kristy’s move into founding his own clothing company, which bears the same name as his channel. With a wealth of knowledge gleaned from thousands of hours of researching clothing seams and open lines of communication with many of the same production facilities that create the garments The Iron Snail reviews, Kristy is uniquely situated to create clothing that appeals to him, and thus his audience. But he knows he still has tough standards to meet.
“The only way for the clothing brand to work is if it’s cheaper than anybody else,” he says, “and better.”
The YouTube Guide to Style
From aesthetic lifestyle vlogs to deep dives on fabric production, the YouTube style landscape is vast. Here are the channels worth your time.Kristy is acutely aware that not all of YouTube is as uplifting as the Iron Snail community. Men’s lifestyle content, which often includes apparel, is a known cesspool of misogyny and toxic masculinity, with exhaustive reporting documenting its outsized effect on impressionable viewers, particularly young men.
It’s a problem that doesn’t seem to be going away, at least not for now. As Kristy says, “You look at the other side of YouTube — dress this way to get women, or dress this way to rise up in your job — to me, that’s not even really fashion content at that point. It’s still clearly valid to a lot of people, because those videos tend to actually outperform all the other videos, they get millions and millions of views.”
Still, with more subscribers discovering The Iron Snail every day and new apparel in the works, it seems like the sky’s the limit for Kristy’s little slice of the sartorial internet.
His one request? To stop asking where he gets his clothes. “No matter what the video [I post] is about, people are like, ‘What shirt is that?’ My dad freaks out about that all the time,” Kristy says with a laugh. But his response to these types of FAQs perfectly sums up what The Iron Snail is all about.
“People are always like, ‘What pants are those?’ Well, it doesn’t particularly matter, because if you’re not me, they’re going to fit you a little different.”
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