Clothing-related information-seeking practices in an online menswear community

Despite increasing cultural expectations for men to attend to their physical appearance, there remains significant dearth of face-to-face social contexts in which men can comfortably pursue clothing-related knowledge. As such, there exists scarce scholarship on the ways that men use online resources to construct articulations of masculinity through clothing and dress. In this article, I examine men’s clothing-related knowledge-seeking practices in the subreddit Male Fashion Advice (MFA), a widely visited online style community. Men’s participation in MFA offers a rich and unexplored social context in which to examine this phenomenon. Based on virtual ethnographic fieldwork, I address the following two research questions: (1) Which factors prompt men to seek out clothing-related knowledge and advice? and (2) About which aspects of clothing, style and dress do men express the most concern? I also provide a discussion of the implications of my findings in terms of their consequences for contemporary constructions of masculinities and give suggestions for future research.