How Men Can Instantly Look More Attractive | Tanner Guzy

Intro

the things that you want to convey with your clothing and with your style are very different than the things that i want to convey and it becomes really easy to see especially older men if you ever see an older guy that's in like his 50s and he looks like he's trying to dress like he's 18 or he's in his mid-20s it's because his wife is dressing him because for her being able to signal things like youth or maintain fertility or trendiness or relevance those are those are good from a female perspective but from a male perspective that makes you look like you're denying like you haven't accomplished anything over the last 20 30 years and so you're still trying to hold on to all this untested potential as opposed to no i've earned some status and i've made some i've made some moves and i've i've attained a certain level of credibility and a certain level of status within my life and i want to dress in a way that symbolizes that welcome to episode 123 of the michaela peterson podcast in this episode i spoke with men's style coach author and tedx speaker tanner guzzy it was interesting because i feel the focus on men's fashion has shifted dramatically over the last few decades and fashion is something every guy should know about and don't it's so easy to look good or at least look better depending on how you dress and you get treated so differently if you put a bit of effort into your appearance it can be the difference between getting a job or not or a relationship or not or being taken seriously even if you don't know what you're talking about it's important and many men don't know anything about fashion we covered topics like how personality is expressed through style choosing suits and shoes the three archetypes of male fashion husbands dressing for their wives men wearing dresses we also went into a bit of detail about guzzi's personal life the joys of parenthood and his time spent as a missionary for the church of latter-day saints this was a pretty cool episode i hope you guys enjoy it and have a good week [Music] tanner guzzy welcome to the podcast thanks for having me on mikael i'm excited to be here it's nice to see you again yeah this should be a fun conversation before before we get into it can you give a brief background about who you are and what it is you do yes so tanner guzzy i am based out of the salt lake city-ish area uh born and raised here i am uh a father of five and i have one of the weirdest jobs in the world i'm a men's style coach so i teach guys how to dress better and why they should even give a crap about what their clothes are and how they look and how they present themselves with their grooming and all of that too that's good i think that's very important i think that's very important i guess i guess we should start off by why does it matter how you look the biggest thing is because it is a it's a way to express yourself not only to the world around you but also to change your own self perception when it's done right it's just as powerful as learning how to to read and write the the ability to articulate yourself through your appearance is just as powerful and just as important as it is to do it with the written or the spoken language i think that's fair i think that's something that's underestimated right now about how much it matters and people care what you look like you're completely judged right away yeah and you should be because we're visual creatures and we can't take in we can't treat people like they're blank slates like everything is completely open and there's no prejudgments or preconceptions now obviously being mature means that you take that initial impression and then you re-evaluate it based on new information that you get as you get to know people and you go through that process as well but our brains would explode if we didn't have initial impressions of people based on how they looked or how they sound or all these other kind of patterns that we learn how to recognize yeah what does it look like when you get started with a client you go through their wardrobe do you suggest certain things based on how they already look yeah i actually don't do a lot of suggestions until we get quite a ways into the program because i need to figure out who they are how they see themselves fitting within the world and what the ideal version of them looks like how they want to communicate themselves to the people at work or their family or dating prospects or any of those things and so we go through a pretty detailed process of discovering all that a lot of it starts with what they have in their wardrobe and then after we're done with that then that's when i start making recommendations but what's really cool is most of the time i don't need to make that many recommendations because my guys get good enough with this on their own that they're making really good decisions by themselves so you get people to look at an ideal version of themselves yeah okay that makes sense so are there any style like complete no's like how do you feel about bedazzled jeans can anyone make this look good well okay here's the thing where it gets really interesting and i guess we can continue to compare it to language or articulation is that you think about some of those things like bedazzled jeans or crocs or really baggy cargo shorts or that kind of stuff and right and that's almost the equivalent of of your swear words where there are very few times when it's appropriate to do it but when it is it's really appropriate to do it but most of us overly rely on that kind of language and too many men overly rely on those types of clothes and so you need to be yeah you need to be more specific with how you do it how do you feel about birkenstocks perks honestly man there are some guys especially when when you're in kind of a coastal area they can be a really cool kind of a beach look or you can get a little kind of like new england wasp to it or something else and so i think berks when they're done in the right context can end up looking pretty cool okay okay what what kind of person does does every man need a good suit what does a good suit look like how does somebody tell when they're wearing a good suit okay there's a lot of questions in that one no not every man needs a good suit anymore which sucks because suiting used to be something that was kind of ubiquitous and people really understood that when you were if you were participating in western civilization if you were doing something that you wanted to communicate dignity and respect and self-mastery any sort of credibility or authority you would wear a suit yeah but we've not only moved away from the idea of hierarchies in general but we've also kind of split from rather being this big kind of homogeneous western culture into being a bunch of smaller tribes and you get different cultures based on the industry that you work in or based on the music that you listen to or what your political ideology is or even you know simple things like are you an apple or an android guy and all this other kind of stuff and so we've moved away from this homogenous culture into something that's a lot more tribe specific and in so many of those wearing a suit is actually a big sign of being an outside an outsider and so it makes you it actually comes with more reliability than with more advantages to it wow wow okay wild right yeah i mean you look at movies and videos of things in the 50s and everybody looked i feel like people look better than they look now and there's an aesthetic component that we miss for sure and obviously the suit isn't the only way to do it because you go back 300 years and people looked good and healthy and strong and men looked like men and women looked like women and it wasn't suits like we see it today or you go back to you know ancient aztec culture or the romans or you know the aborigines or anybody else and we've always used clothing and there's always been an aesthetic component to it and sadly for so many of the these micro tribes that we're in we're kind of caught up in this post-modernism where we reject beauty we reject aesthetics and in order to be able to signal that you're part of the group that you understand the language you have to embrace a level of ugliness and it sucks yeah do you think that's because people i've been torn about this i assume that's because the general population has gotten more unhealthy so just we've gotten uglier as a whole so it's like why not embrace it like potentially the fat acceptance movement is because people can't figure out how to lose weight they don't understand that what they eat matters can't lose weight so why not make it an acceptance movement movement if you can't figure out how to change it yeah i agree with that and it's not even i don't think acceptance is is correct with how far it's gotten they call it fat acceptance but it's really this like we're going to reject beauty we're going to reject goodness we're going to reject health so that you don't reject us it's almost like um like the the aesop's sour grapes fables of you know i just don't want those lower or those higher grapes because they're probably sour anyway or it's eminem in eight mile you know rapping about all of his weaknesses so that in that rap battle the guy can't actually get anything else on him it's this complete rejection of of these traditional standards and if you if i reject you first you can't reject me you know you can't fire me i quit type of thing oh that could be it yeah they shut down didn't they shut down victoria's secrets this year victoria's secret the runway show did you hear about that yeah yeah and they started doing again you've got all this uh these kind of like anti-beauty beauty standards where it's all about we're embracing all people at all size and all and i get it i mean body acceptance is wonderful when you look at things like uh you look at people who come back from war and they're missing limbs or burn victims or other things that really are it's out of your control you're born a certain way in and that and honestly even if you are if you're if you're fat and you can't control it it doesn't mean you don't have any value as a person but you're missing out on not only communicating your full value but experiencing your full value if you don't try and make yourself healthy and also in some way aesthetically valid if you don't try and make yourself beautiful as a woman or handsome as a man you miss out on what your full potential is yes people react to you differently too like even when i got healthy and i lost weight people reacted to me differently dramatically or i have blonde hair right now and my hair is not naturally blonde i get a completely different reaction being blonde right yeah and you're the same person but do you also see yourself differently does your self-perception change a little bit when you see yourself in the mirror compared to before you were blonde or when you were bigger oh definitely right it's huge yeah it's huge okay what tips do you have for people if they want to get started so say say that they've been focused on work or family and i wouldn't i don't want to say like let things go but just haven't prioritized how they look how do you suggest people get started or make it a higher priority i would say the first thing to do for most men is go through your closet and throw out anything that has any sort of a graphic print on it because you should not be basing your identity based on whatever product it is that you consume or you should not be looking so apathetic that you're still wearing the t-shirt that your company hosted a 5k and you just got the t-shirt for free when you showed up to work that day like you should be projecting yourself as more than that and so get rid of anything that has any graphics on it and then from there start to focus on pay attention to people around you pay attention to those that look like they are that they're credible that they're successful that they're happy that they're authoritative that they're dignified whatever the virtues are that are the things that you want to emulate pay attention to the people around you and look at people who look like they express those things and then start to emulate what those styles are especially because it's different it's different in toronto than it is in salt lake which is different than nashville and it's different if you work in tech versus if you're in a blue collar industry and so there's not any specific like just this one technical thing you can do just like you can't say you know learn how to use these words if you speak french or if you speak english or you speak german because the words all mean something different so you have to focus on what's the meaning you want to convey and how are the people in your world conveying that same meaning and start to emulate it from there does that make sense that does make sense that does make sense yeah look at what you're trying to convey look at people who are doing what you're trying to convey yeah yeah that's smart okay hair do you have hair tip styles or does that completely differ for people as well facial hair is a little bit what's in right now right there's a lot of man well and again right no you're good i love that question because it comes down to again like we don't have this this kind of homogeneous culture same thing with like what are the trends that are coming down the pike and i don't know it depends are you do you are you into sports and what kind of sports are you into are you in this industry or that industry but hair is different because hair and and beards are different because you actually have limitations if you don't have a good set a good head of hair if you're starting to really lose it honestly just shave it and embrace the bald look there aren't very many masculine ways to have a receding hairline that looks good on you same thing if you've got a patchy beard that come that doesn't come in great sorry with the way most of the world is right now you can't do a goatee without looking like you're holding on to the 90s and so you're better off either doing clean shaven or doing a full thing but a lot of it is going to be dependent on on what your actual genetics and what your health markers are but what a lot of guys really should be doing is using their grooming their hair their beard even their physique or their posture their body language yeah as a way to kind of counter signal a lot of what they're doing with their clothing because what most men do is they get really one dimensional with their appearance it's i'm i'm you know you go back to the high school stereotypes of i'm a jock and so everything about me looks like the jock or i'm a nerd and so everything about me looks like a nerd and a fully established adult man should be multi-dimensional and so you should be able to look really clean in a suit but maybe you've got a beard and long hair and so it's like oh this is a little bit more interesting because he isn't so perfectly polished or maybe you've got you know a really big build because you're strong and you've taken good good care of yourself in the gym and and so you dress in a way that's a little bit more friendly and inviting instead of intimidating or you have some fat and some weight to lose and so you dress in a way that counter signals that yes i still am disciplined and i'm dignified and i still pay attention to the details even if my physique isn't exactly where i want it to be either but create some multi-dimensionality between all of these aspects of how you present yourself to people when you're trying to give people style advice do you also work on physique and diet and lifestyle i usually partner up with other coaches to kind of point them towards that and a lot of times most of my clients are guys who come in and they're already halfway through that journey they see the value of it and that's when they decide they want to start working on the clothing aspect of it too okay but yeah it's a huge aspect honestly the biggest thing that you can do to improve your appearance has nothing to do with clothes it's getting better shape that that's the biggest thing you could do yeah you see people at fashion shows and they're wearing curtains right like it just looks terrible and like oh no that was unique stylish like no that person was hot yeah yeah exactly yeah do you find that men are dressing less masculine and are we just headed continually heading in that direction because i've seen like people are showing up in dresses now i'm not sure how i feel about that i don't think i feel good about it i'm open though like do whatever but i don't find it attractive but like what's going on there yeah i think we're seeing two different movements you're seeing this move towards androgyny and that's where you get a lot of the dresses you get a lot of the high fashion you get a lot of kind of the urbanites and it's almost along kind of political or ideological lines where this idea of androgyny in men or women are interchangeable and there's not there not that many differences and then at the same time on the other hand you get this kind of like anti-aesthetic aesthetic of you're going to have to pry my cargo shorts and my 80s metal t-shirt and my combat boots out of my cold dead hands because there's no way i'm ever going to wear anything besides that oh yeah neither neither of those are ideal exactly and both of them become kind of caricatures of of what they really could be or should be and we've rejected the idea of there being a deliberate and intentional and at the same time masculine way to dress because we either reject masculinity and embrace fashion or embrace trends or embrace androgyny or we reject aesthetics and embrace masculinity but we treat both of these as if they're mutually exclusive and they're not how did you get started doing this man i so the early the early story of it is i went to a private school when i was seventh eighth grade sixth grade stuff like that had to wear the gray dress slacks the white shirt the rep stripe tie the navy blazer the whole thing i was really really this was like mid-90s i was really big into punk rock and bmx bikes and snowboards and all of that and so i wanted green liberty spikes and i wanted battle jackets right like just the complete opposite as far as an aesthetic and especially you go back to like the 90s gutter punk and it was very in your face and i couldn't wear that when i was in school or my friends that were my friends that i would ride bikes with would see me come home from school and they would make fun of me because i was wearing my private school clothes and so i learned from experience pretty early on how much appearance has to do with identity and how much it has to do with shaping your own sense of who you are and also how people perceive you and then that was something that was kind of in my pocket for a long time i dealt with it when i was serving as a missionary for my church in toronto actually so kind of in your home your hometown and uh had to wear a suit and a tie all the time and the way people perceive me there and so about 10 years ago i realized that i was interested in it i wanted to write about something i was sick about writing about politics or anything and so i started a little blog called masculine style and it's picked up momentum and here we are 10 years later and i get to do this full time that's very cool okay can we talk about missionary work you're comfortable yeah absolutely okay so yeah yeah absolutely give me a background on that we'll take this conversation in a slightly different direction what brought you to toronto and what were what were you doing exactly yeah so i'm a member of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints and what we do is for young men you have a commitment where you go out and you serve a full-time mission for two years i'm sure you've seen the guys with like the black name tags on their chests they're wearing the white shirts and the suits and all that yep so you go do that for two years uh when i went you went when you were 19 now they have guys go a little bit younger but you don't get to pick where you go nor do you get to pick the language that you speak you just open up an envelope that says this is where you're going and when you leave and when you come back and here's the language you're speaking wow okay yeah that's interesting so i got it that's pretty good then that could have been weird right well and i have you know i have one of my brothers served in the czech republic another one was supposed to serve in haiti but because of the unrest there he ended up going to fort lauderdale florida i have cousins that hate here okay exactly right but i mean i've had cousins that have served in like the sticks of panama or people that have been in russia like you really can go kind of anywhere almost to the point where i remember being a little bit disappointed that i was going to canada because all of your friends go to all these exotic places and they get to do it in a whole different way but i had to speak spanish which helped it helped kind of make it feel a little bit different and i fell in love with the city and i fell in love with with being able to learn how to express myself in spanish and it was it was a hard two years for sure i mean you uh you're doing it full time you're not dating you're not going not going to school you're not working uh when i was out i got two phone calls a year with my family i'd call them on christmas and on mother's day and other than that it was emails once a week and you were in the trenches like it's it's a full-on monk mode right of passage and you're talking to people about religion and you're trying to help them see what religion is and what a relationship with god and christ can be and to hopefully join the join the church and it's it's intense yeah and i feel like people in toronto also aren't particularly religious yeah we dealt with uh i couldn't tell most the time if people hated me more for being a latter-day saint or for being an american but we deal with a lot of resentment from a lot of people wow at 19 that's pretty yeah that's interesting that's interesting it's so good for you i can't wait for my son to go do it it's just it's so good for you because you learn how you learn how to do hard things you learn how to deal with social pressure and apprehension you learn how to deal with discipline you learn how to deal with it it's so good for you in so many ways it's got to be scary you learn how to deal with people who don't want to talk to you that's scary oh yeah i mean imagine going and sitting down by somebody on the bus and you know they don't want to talk to you because they recognize the name tag and they know what you're all about and then trying to speak to them in spanish or some language that you started learning five weeks ago it's terrifying and it's so good for you because it's so terrifying oh wow that's intense yeah okay well that makes sense and you said they do it earlier now how do you make money yeah they said you get like an amount of money you get a year or something to survive you actually you you pay to do it what yeah yeah wow yeah okay well now i know okay do you do you talk about style archetypes at all i do yeah in fact i have three that i break it down to go through those let's get into those yeah okay this is really good because the archetypes really help people to understand i think one of the big mistakes that that we currently make is that we see style as something that creative people whether that's designers or the people at magazines or influencers something else that they create and then we adopt and you know it's kind of like the fight club like you're not your khakis type of thing but what style really is is you start with who you are on the inside and then you express that externally through your clothing so it starts inside and moves out as opposed to starting outside and moving in and in order to do that correctly you have to identify where you fall within these particular archetypes and i work with three of them so you've got rugged refined and rakish really easy to remember the three r's and what this is is how you interact with the world around you so the guys who are primarily rugged they interact with the world through physical means and it may be kind of the stereotypical association of like the lumberjack or the blue collar worker or the cowboy or it may be somebody who's more just like a musician or a triathlete or somebody that still engages in the world physically and their happiest when they're doing things physically and so you start to dress in a way that expresses that the refined guys are guys who understand systems and hierarchies and social pecking orders and all of that and they thrive by being able to play by the rules climb the ladder get on the good side of the boss network the right way and they're really good at understanding and following the rules and that's how they can kind of thrive within society and you dress in a way that reflects that as well and then the rakish guys they understand that hierarchy just as well as the refined guys but they thrive by going against it by throwing a big middle finger to it and rejecting it and so they dress in a way that reflects that as well and it's fun as you start to see these different archetypes and everybody has all three of them but you also get them in different ratios you know most guys will be primarily one or even two more so than all three but as you start to dress in a way that reflects those in the proper ratios you feel incredibly congruent and authentic in what your style is because it feels like you know when you see yourself in the mirror what you see actually looks like how you feel as opposed to there being this dissonance between the two of them yeah yeah i feel that okay yeah one one comment when i got healthy that's how i felt i can remember looking right yeah i remember looking in the mirror before i got really sick and being like well i look better than i feel and then it started to like even the playing field i was like oh no i'm looking kind of how i feel uh and then yeah things things weren't so good okay this rakish style so how do you go how do you go against what other people are doing and still end up stylish what's an example it depends on what your tribe is because you know if you live in the suburbs of utah and most the guys around me in my neighborhood they work in the tech industry so they're wearing just kind of plain t-shirts and they're they've got shortly cropped hair and they're wearing simple skinny jeans and and t-shirts or and sneakers even for me just having longer hair and having a fuller beard and looking like i pay more attention to my style looks more rakish you get into urban environments and you get a lot of like street wear and the sneaker heads and that kind of stuff and that's incredibly rakish you can go into more of a rock and roll type style that you would see um depending on the decade whether it's like the beatles were rakish because of the way that they dress you certainly can get into punk rock or metal or a lot of the stuff that guys will wear when they're doing music videos or they're on stage and that's rakish and honestly even if it were something as simple as everybody in your office wore a white shirt and you showed up to work wearing a blue one that's rakish in and of itself too so it has a lot more to do with a comparison to the people around you than there being any objective standard of what rakishness is okay say you're that makes sense say you're trying to hide a part of you like make one area bigger one area smaller or you're bigger than you want to be and you want to be slimmer let's let's start with that one if you're bigger than you want to be and you want to appear slimmer what are this what style advice do you have for those guys we're talking about hiding yourself and all that just like from a fear a pure physical component not like my presence is bigger but my body is bigger and i want to physically just physical gotcha okay a couple of easy ways to do that and a lot of this i'm sure you know because the the same rules kind of apply to women you wear solids and dark colors you have minimal transition between what you look like on top and what you look like on the bottom so if you're doing a more monochromatic look that helps vertical stripes can do a lot of good where it draws people's eyes in and draws them up so that they can kind of slim you out there and then for a lot of men um especially because most of us when we're bigger than we want to be we tend to carry more weight in our stomachs and in our love handles and kind of right there through the midsection and so what you want to do is you want to find shirts that they fit nice and snug in the chest and the traps the shoulders and the upper arms so it almost looks like you're so jacked that you're kind of nice and snug through there but then it's a little bit looser with a little bit more drape down through the waist and through the seat kind of in that midsection area because one it hides that and then two it also draws all this visible attention to your shoulders and your upper body instead and so it artificially creates that v shape that that's the most masculine aesthetic and that most of us are after okay that's good how do you feel about square toed shoes i'm so glad that trend is dead that one is so bad it's there's there's nothing aesthetic about it they were just ugly and they were a trend a certain oh i'm so glad they're gone okay that's kind of how i feel that's one of those like one of the few four-letter words in the aesthetic world that that's yeah you just don't ever say you don't ever say four square-toned shoes you there's there's no excuse that makes those work i mean yeah maybe you go back 25 years ago and and they would have worked them because that was what was expected but they're terrible if you own them get rid of them today okay i'm glad i'm glad you brought that up uh so crocs well how do you feel about those sandals that are super strappy those have got to go too right the ones that you have straps just i feel like they're called i just know them because my dad used to wear them all the time and like the haraches oh no i feel like i went into an area that you like i don't know what a haracha is what's apracha they're kind of like they're made i think they're made in southern mexico um or like uh central america upper south america but they've got a bunch of different straps all over them and those if you're in the right environment kind of like birkenstocks can end up being really cool but they're tough to pull off in the right way i gotta i gotta find photos of what your dad used to wear so that i can i can tell him if he's doing a good job with them or not they were pretty bad i think they were closed-toed but they just had a lot of straps anyway uh so you'd put the strappy sandals in the same category as birkenstocks no the the horaces same thing with like espadrilles do you remember toms when those were really big ten years ago yeah yeah those are in espadrille and those have like a classic spanish origin where it's almost like a slipper with the rope sole and if you're in a coastal area and it's summer you can do those and do them really well you know if you're if you're in florida or you're in spain or ibiza or you know like you've got a lot of different options you can do stuff like that and those birkenstocks barrages espadrilles way better than most flip-flops okay that's fair that's fair um what recommendations do you have for people who are i know this is gonna differ depending on where the person's located but if you're trying to impress somebody on a date and exude confidence what kind of outfit goes with that so the biggest thing that i would say is wear something obviously it needs to be you know context appropriate for what it is that you're doing on the date and where you live time time of year and all of that but the biggest thing that i would say is wear something that makes you feel like you're on fire makes you feel like you're the best version of yourself sadly what a lot of men do is when they're getting ready to go out on date they put on something that part of their brain goes this looks good and i should feel good in it but then the other part feels really self-conscious am i trying too hard does this not fit right is am i you know is this too ostentatious am i am i calling for too much attention and so they have this internal battle that's happening subconsciously the whole time and remove that don't wear something a date is the wrong time to experiment with something new you should already be really comfortable in what you're wearing so that it almost feels like you're putting on a social version or an aesthetic version of what your battle armor is so that you can go in and you can be totally mentally and emotionally freed up to focus on what you're doing on the date as opposed to that nagging in the back your head the whole time that you're out there okay that makes sense uh have you seen what kind of different style can make to somebody's love life like have you seen somebody without like losing weight say with just changing how they dress have you seen what difference that can make it's massive especially for for married men um i mean it's huge for guys that are in the dating market a lot of my clients are kind of young guys that work in the tech space and for them to not only see themselves as now multi-dimensional but actually carry themselves with some level of confidence it makes dating so much easier but especially for men that are married and they've been in a relationship for a long time because your wife doesn't want to dress you she doesn't want to see you as another one of the kids that she has to now think about this and she has to choose your clothes i mean it's so emasculating and it kills the respect that she can have for you she wants you to look good and that's why she chooses to dress you because dressing you is better than you looking like garbage but what's even better is if you can dress yourself in a way that looks attractive and it looks dignified and it looks self-respecting and she knows that who she knows on the inside this person that she's in love with this person that she's spent all these years with that that's what she sees when she sees you know she posts you up on social media or that's what she sees when you guys go do family photos for that year or whatever it is that you kind of get these versions of it that she's proud to have you to be on your arm when you go out on a date or when you go out you know with friends in the neighborhood or you go grab drinks and she's not embarrassed that you're saying it changes her whole perception of you your respectability your own sense of self and it it's it's massive okay that was good so no square toads shoes no square till we just go back to them yeah i think that that's that's really important because i have friends too that will help their significant other to dress but it's entirely because they're like you cannot wear that you cannot wear that and be seen with me wear this instead but that's a pretty low bar you're like aiming for something a bit higher up exactly well and a big part of it too is that women and men have different aesthetic goals when we get dressed the things that you want to convey with your clothing and with your style are very different than the things that i want to convey and it becomes really easy to see especially older men if you ever see an older guy that's in like his 50s and he looks like he's trying to dress like he's 18 or he's in his mid-20s it's because his wife is dressing him because for her being able to signal things like youth or maintain fertility or trendiness or relevance those are those are good from a female perspective but from a male perspective that makes you look like you're denying like you haven't accomplished anything over the last 20 30 years and so you're still trying to hold on to all this untested potential as opposed to no i've earned some status and i've made some i've made some moves and i've i've attained a certain level of credibility and a certain level of status within my life and i want to dress in a way that symbolizes that and so that's one of the biggest differences in the way that men and women dress and another reason why you shouldn't let most women dress you oh that's really good advice do you think there's a way for people who are younger so say you're younger at a job is there a benefit in dressing like some of the older people only if you've earned some level of status uh this is why you can get i'm gonna pick on these guys because it's so obvious but you get like the college republicans that they dress up in their suits and they just look they just look so dorky in the way that they do it and it's because there's this disparity between how young and untested how they don't have any credibility they don't have any experience they don't have any mastery but the suit still because we as a culture are not so far removed that it doesn't have any symbolism to us to us it still represents that and so it's it's basically i'm relying on my clothing to signal something that i that isn't actually consistent with who i am and so the easiest way for young guys to be able to dress well in a work environment is to not dress up more formally or to not emulate the guys that are at the absolute like top of the echelon but dress like everybody else that's in your same kind of tier but make sure your stuff fits better focus on simpler colors and make sure that you buy higher quality versions of it because even though people won't be able to quantify the difference between like a twenty dollar shirt that you picked up at a department store and a hundred dollar custom shirt you they will see the difference even if they can't pinpoint what it is and you will you will be seen as somebody who still is young and understands his position but has potential and is and is doing more than everybody else around him and so becomes this very subtle way of communicating that to the to the people at work ah okay so be more subtle high quality okay that's good advice how much do people how do you do this on a lower budget how do you look good on a lower budget um the biggest thing is it's still possible but you just have to focus on keeping things simple and keeping things that fit will fit well while still sending the right signals depending on where you are and what you do a lot of guys okay one of the biggest mistakes that beginners make when they start trying to dress better is they associate dressing better with dressing more formally so you know if everybody at work is in jeans and a t-shirt then i'm going to show up in slacks in a button-up shirt you don't dress more formally you stay at the same level formality as everybody else they focus a lot on color where it's i have to have all this new color to be able to bring in because then i stand out and i look different or they focus on pattern um which is you know i the number of guys who i know that resent the idea of wearing just like a plain white or a plain blue shirt to work whether that's a t-shirt or a polo or a button shirt they hate it because then that feels so conformist it feels so small and so they end up wearing a patterned shirt and they don't ever pay attention and look around them and realize that everybody else is also wearing patterned shirts because they're trying to stand out and so ignore ignore formality ignore color ignore pattern focus on fit focus on quality to the best that you can afford and then focus on simplicity because you want your clothing to be you want it to be the frame of the painting and you're the painting itself you're what people are paying attention to whereas too many guys become the mannequin for the clothing and they're all about showcasing the clothes instead of it going the right way okay what are your favorite uh for lack of a better term lower end cheaper clothing brands okay so here in the states um honestly you can do pretty well even if you go shop at somewhere like target um they're good fellow and co uh they're like kind of houseline they do a pretty good job as far as fit and keeping things simple and keeping things relevant without either being too trendy or too uh too outdated they do a good job um if you're younger then you can have some luck at h m but it's really hard to avoid all the kind of crazy out there egregious stuff and then same thing with places like zara where avoid like the hyper skinny fits or the really ostentatious stuff but you can find you can find good looking stuff at those places and do it for relatively cheap i'm also like take advantage of outlets go to the j crew outlet go to banana republic outlet go to go to the polo outlet and uh and you can do really well on on a pretty good budget with brands like that too okay what about shoes shoes you can't do it cheap and do it well you got to invest in it it's worth it because not only is it good from an aesthetic perspective because cheap shoes look cheap and it's really apparent to anybody who knows what they're paying attention to but it's terrible from a health perspective you're going to kill your you're going to kill your posture you're going to kill the way your arches are your feet are going to get too too cramped in that that can start to lead to you know ankle issues or knee issues or back problems or anything else and so shoes are one of those things that it's not worth going cheap on invest that they invest in the best you can afford with those go cheaper on pants and shirts if that means buying higher quality shoes okay what about accessories man accessories okay totally different with men because with women you can buy accessories purely for the sake of aesthetics does it look good does it make me look beautiful does it make me look does it make me look better for men we don't have that way of doing it accessories have to have some sort of meaning to them you can't just like pick them up on the impulse aisle as you're getting ready to check out that at checkout of the store it has to have some sort of meaning or symbolism to it okay does that make sense yeah it does so it has to have a use right right well not even necessarily like a like a functional use but it can be something like um you know maybe you get yourself maybe get yourself a good watch or a particular bracelet or a necklace or something else to commemorate a big milestone you know i'm about to hit five years of being self-employed and so i'm looking at good rolexes for me to be able to kind of have that as something that i can celebrate that way um so if it commemorates something that you've done uh if it's something that you picked up on travel that's a that's a really good reason to have an accessory where you know it's kind of telling a story that hey i picked this up while i was surfing in costa rica or i did this as part of you know a trip to the mediterranean or whatever else if there's a story that's associated with it um if there's some sort of family history to it where you know these are the cufflinks that my grandpa wore at his wedding and i got them at my wedding and i can wear them now or if you inject some sort of symbolism to it like i've got a big signet ring that has a lot of religious significance to it and so anything that has some sort of like religious or philosophical symbolism um that when you see it reminds you of something then you can get away with wearing accessories that way so it has to have some sort of either physical social or psychological purpose in order to pull off something like a bracelet a necklace or ring or something else okay so seashell necklaces welcome back to 1998. yes i mean again if you're you know if you're if you're doing a search for surf tour down in jamaica and you happen to be living there for the next eight weeks or eight months because you're a digital nomad by all means embrace it make it part of your style when you go back to wherever it is that you are but don't just pick them up because that's what you see on somebody's instagram feed and you think it looks cool it has to have more meaning to it than that for you okay got it uh what about favorite high-end brands what are the best of the best and which ones are are expensive but no good oh okay so for the most part expensive but no good is really the couture brands um where you're buying you're buying status without it really coming in as far as quality so stuff like gucci or louis vuitton or any of this this stuff and i mean a lot of it sure it can be decent from a quality perspective but again what you're doing is you are you're swapping your identity from being something that's self-created and self-made into my identity is based on my consumption of this particular product that you have to see my gucci belts or my mule loafers or you have to see you know my tom ford sunglasses and that's that's how you know that i'm a worthwhile person is because i'm attaching myself to this particular brand and so you want more subtlety in the luxury that you're buying and so that's going to be though right and i mean again if you're getting rakish with some stuff there's ways to do it right there are ways to be able to play it right but for most guys they overly rely on this where it's just they don't have anything else going for them and so they try to create an identity based on this the stuff that they're buying or wearing or consuming so there are ways to do it but but not necessarily the biggest trick to this even if it's not necessarily high end because it depends i mean 200 for a suit is not high-end but 200 for a decent t-shirt is pretty dang high-end it so it depends on what you're buying and what it is that you're in but what i what i recommend most guys get familiar with this is one of the benefits of the time that we live in now you go to a department store like a macy's or a nordstrom or even like a jcpenney or a kohl's or a dillards or something else and they have to appeal to as many people as possible in order to make in order to be profitable because they're they're focused on a particular like actual physical storefront and what the people are that come in and buy from them internet changed everything with that with online brands you can have brands that cater to a very specific body type or a very specific aesthetic or a very specific uh desire for it being you know made in the usa or it's untreated cotton or all these other things because now they can sell to a global market and so they can actually still be profitable without being limited to what the geography is and so the biggest thing is to find the brands that work for you based on the signals that you want to send based on what works for your body and then be really loyal to those brands so that you can go out and continue to buy stuff and support them and then the stuff's going to look really good on you so like for me one of my favorite brands is a company called buck mason they're based out of california and i love the fit on their stuff it fits me perfectly i love the way that it feels uh the quality of it is really good and the price point is enough that it feels premium but it also doesn't feel like uh you know i gotta save up to to get something from these guys and so it checks all these boxes for me really well and what's cool is that that's all subjective for every man and it's worth it to find out what the brands are uh that it's worth being loyal to in that regard okay and then so you talked about gucci and how some people overdo it on that just for status is that different when you're buying something like the rolex watch because it's not a main piece how does how do you differentiate between when it's status seeking or not good question i like that okay so i would say that there's two things to that the first one yeah i think you're totally right that it depends on how much attention it draws okay because if it's a giant t-shirt that's just you know almost crassly blaring it in your face that's very different than being something that's a little bit subtle i think that's why gucci loafers or something can be a little bit more so because they're in a little bit more subtle location and then the other thing too has to do with oh man michaela there's so many things that go into this okay because part of it has to do with your archetypes the more rakish you are then the more you can the more you can kind of command that that attention and the more you can do it that way uh the higher your status is within either your respective tribe or just kind of society in general the more you can get away with i always use conor mcgregor as a good example of this where he can wear this kind of stuff because it's actually this like giant middle finger go to hell attitude to what the mma community used to be where it was all like the tap out stuff and and the affliction stuff when he comes in wearing couture stuff or wearing well-fitted suits that have these big patterns and but he could only do it because he was he's good enough as a fighter that he can back it up some kid that's just brand new and isn't winning any bouts he's not he's not actually winning any fights if he dresses like that it's a joke so your relative mastery your status within a particular organization comes into play there too and then the other thing to factor in is even like rolex for an example is how much of a status signal is something within a particular tribe versus within society in general because i mean if you show up with a submariner like a really big flashy rolex most people are going to recognize that for what it is but you show up with the one i'm looking at is like a 1984 uh blue dial datejust and for most people that i'm around they're never even gonna know what it is but to the people that are in kind of like my menswear tribe or my entrepreneurial tribe they're gonna recognize it for what it is and they're going to going to be able to appreciate it in a different way so there's all these little things that come into play with it and it can sound really complex and complicated but again it's the same thing with language where you learn what jargon you can use i mean we see this on different uh online communities and how uh your your different nomenclature these words mean this or those words mean that and and it's almost this kind of like intra tribal in order to bring people in and we communicate between us and at the same time exclude the people that aren't like us yeah it kind of serves both of these functions and so a lot of clothing accessories all of that has those same those same functions too okay that makes sense that's all good um what are your you can even see that historically where um like the whole idea of you don't wear white um except between memorial day and labor day yeah that was just to separate old money from new money where the new money didn't get those rules and so it was a way for the old money to be able to like exclude them same thing with um you don't wear black you don't mix black and brown with formal wear that was a british aristocracy thing that when you were out in your country house you were brown and when you were in the city you were black and so it was really crass to mix the two of them because it was indicative of the fact that you didn't have a country estate that you could you could go to you didn't understand these social nuances of what the aristocracy were and how they operated and so it was this very specific way of we're us and you're them and we create these arbitrary rules to keep it separate and the more complicated and the more limiting those rules are the happier we are about it nice i hadn't heard about that don't wear white until i don't even know what it is it's memorial day and labor day i'm canadian i don't know yeah so you can't well it yeah you can't wear it until memorial day and you can't wear it after labor day so it's a summer only color white yeah okay somebody told me that this year i was like what are you talking about what year is that from when did that stop being a thing is it still a thing i well it depends i mean if you're up in new england if you're up at montauk or something that's still a thing but for the for most of the rest of us not really and that was just that was what like rich people knew about there was arbitrary rules that they created to separate the old wealth from the new wealth interesting so you can find out what all those rules are and then copy them sneak your way and and whether you like it or not you exist in a world that has those rules if you work at facebook you have rules like that you don't show up to work in a suit you get laughed out of the room you well it doesn't matter where you work or what you do if you go to your landscaping job and you're wearing something that's a little bit too skinny or it's a little bit too high quality and they're gonna poke fun of you they're gonna they're gonna and so you get this men intuitively get this because we're constantly evaluating the heart the hierarchy and ever since we were teenagers we've understood that clothing is a part of it and what i want men to to start to do is do that more intentionally as opposed to reactionally or reactively you think this has a lot like you paying attention to style like this do you think this has a lot to do with personality versus people who are like nah i don't care this is comfortable um i think to some extent it does um and you know if you kind of like to nerd out on social dynamics or if you like to understand how people work i think to a large extent being more in like the refined or the rakish archetypes you're going to have more of a propensity to go this way because it does fall so much within understanding dynamics and human interaction and all of that uh what i would argue though is for the vast majority of men who just kind of oh i don't care you challenge them to do something like okay wear a pink dress for the next week and tell me if you don't feel different and tell me if you actually don't care but for them the the caring is in the not caring their antipathy is just as emotional of a reaction to their clothing as somebody else's affinity to it is and very few men actually have a true indifference to what their appearance is and i would argue that it's not even about what you care about it's about how society perceives you and you don't have a lot of control over that so you can say oh this doesn't matter this is my style but it's going to deeply affect everything you do totally and so why why handicap yourself when you can use it to your advantage instead yeah it's like life hacks these things and it's crazy and i remember reading about marilyn monroe and she said she because she had her an insane style right with her hair and her winged eyeliner and her lipstick she had something really serious going on and she said she could just turn that off she just dressed in a completely different way nobody would recognize her right so it's like have you seen zoe de chanel without bangs or glasses like you don't even recognize her right yeah yeah and it's the whole idea of clark kent in superman and the only difference is he's in a suit and he has glasses on in the little curly coif is gone and that's it but it really we get so used to seeing people certain ways that it does become a different identity as soon as you start to change it yeah and i suppose for people who are interested in like i talked to robert greene recently and he does the art of seduction that was a really fun conversation uh if you're interested in how to like maneuver your way in social situations and conversations and what you should say and how you should act then you should also be interested very interested in how you look absolutely and he obviously understands that i mean you look at like the 48 laws of power and you look at men like napoleon or washington or machiavelli and how much these men understood the importance of appearance washington i'm going through a biography on him right now it's insane the amount of time and energy that he put into not only his appearance but that of his whole household and even that of his troops because he understood the value of it not only in the social dynamics but also in the self-perception component too so yeah that wouldn't surprise me at all that green would understand that that's very interesting i bet that corresponds because i was thinking maybe it's extroversion i like personality but maybe it's extra virgin you wanting to fit in or pick up on other people but maybe it's also conscientiousness yeah yeah cool cool okay tanner where can people find you online if they want more help do you uh do you get clients specifically do you do this online yep yep so if you want to reach out to me uh the best place to be able to kind of find me and connect us through uh social media i'm most active on twitter and instagram and it's at tanner guzzy so t-a-n-n-e-r-g-u-z-y uh the main site that you can look me up on is masculine-style.com and that's where you can look at more coaching and all of that and then also i've published a book on this called the appearance of power and you can find that on amazon and we've got an audible version of it uh kindle paperback all of that so if you want to kind of well you know cut your teeth on the general concepts that's a really good place to start but i love being able to chat with people online my dms are open and so uh come come talk to me on there i do a lot of this stuff especially on instagram to showcase what a lot of these principles are because i know with the conversation like this a lot of this can can sound kind of heady and it's a whole lot easier to understand these concepts when i'm showing visual examples and so twitter and instagram are really good places to start to see more of that okay thank you very much for coming on that was interesting thanks for having me on i loved it [Music] you

Presenting this week's guest, Tanner Guzy

What’s it like when Tanner starts working with a new client?

Are there any “absolutely-no" moments when it comes to style and fashion?

The changing aesthetic of Western culture

How do you get back into fashion after neglecting your appearance for a while?

Focusing on becoming more multidimensional in your look as a man

Are men dressing less masculine?

How do you get started as a fashion coach?

Mikhaila and Tanner go on a tangent about Guzy’s missionary work as a Latter-Day Saint

Discussing the three style archetypes in men: rugged, refined, and rakish

Dressing around certain troublesome parts of the body

What shoes are a no-go zone for men in 2021?

Recommendations on good outfits for a first date

Do not dress in a way that reflects status you haven’t yet obtained

How to look good on a budget

What expensive brands are actually worth it?

Is there a tasteful way to buy things that show status?

Where did “don’t wear white after labor day” come from?

Creating an iconic style. Famous style icons of the 20th Century

Wrapping up