Style Consultants are Barbers for the Instagram Age

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Tod has a theory. He calls it the “Blue Rut Theory” and it goes like this: You can tell when professional men give up on personal style because they start wearing nothing but navy blue suits and white button downs. Tod, a 55-year-old software engineer, says he has lost countless colleagues to the blue rut. 

“I’m Canadian, though,” he adds. “So I have a plaid rut.” 

Tod, who asked that his last name be kept private because he’s self-conscious about being self-conscious about clothes, recently traveled from Ottawa, where he lives, to Las Vegas for a conference. He walked into a convention hall and saw the predictable thing: a sea of navy blazers. He made a decision. He was fine being a suit. He just didn’t want to be another ill-fitting blue one.

Tod flew home and reached out to Style Girlfriend, a personal styling service for men, run by women.

Style Girlfriend, founded by then-menswear blogger Megan Collins in 2010, offers a wardrobe “overhaul” service that pairs clients with stylists, to cure ASOS-itis and a related suite of fashion maladies. 

In reaching out to Collins, Tod became one of an increasing number of men seeking and accepting interventions from fashion-literate, mostly-female shopping consultants with expertise teaching men to fish for better clothes. These consultations have more in common with a haircut than with what Tan France does on Queer Eye. Tod didn’t reach out because he had no clue what he wanted. He could have gone to one of the many subscription box services flirting with bankruptcy by pairing polo shirts with hatchets if that had been the situation. He reached out because he needed a trim. He needed to sift through all the options he found online. Most importantly, he was willing to pay.

Style Girlfriend has two packages currently going for $379 and $499. If you drop the $500, you get a 30-minute video appointment, a personalized style plan that includes 12 different outfits with shopping recommendations at various price points, styling tips, and access to a stylist via email for two weeks. Tod said that some areas of focus for him, for instance, were style, fit, and layering options, adding that Style Girlfriend expanded his tastes in texture and color. 

Valerie Halfon of Shop With Val, a wardrobe consulting business based in Houston, TX, told SPY that her clients pay from $2,000 to $5,000 per session. After a few consultation sessions, Val picks up and buys clothes for her clients personally, the cost of which is included in those packages. 

A cheaper intervention was perfect for Tod, whose plan was simple: Try not to look aggressively middle-aged. Tod was never poorly dressed and he isn’t determined to improve his dating prospects (he’s been happily married for 28 years, and has two teenage kids). He just needed a zhuzh and he knew it. 

He happened to reach out at a unique time for Collins, who is about to get married, which complicates her branding a bit. She’s never hard-launched a relationship before, she told SPY, for the same reason that boy band members tend to hide their significant others. She wanted to maintain the illusion that followers could make her their style girlfriend. She’s pretty. If you’re dealt a queen, you play it.

Collins’ current place in the market is also complicated by the culture. She launched Style Girlfriend two decades after the first Queer Eye and a few years before its Netflix reboot. The term “metrosexual” had fallen out of common use and Details, the Bible for obsessively-groomed men, was going out of business. But Collins picked up a megaphone and made her voice heard in a frenzied, insecurity-driven cacophony over men’s outfits. Now, that call has been taken up by a chorus of thousands on TikTok and Reddit. 

“It is great that it’s now cool to give a shit,” she says. “A lot of men didn’t grow up learning this information, and they want it from a source that’s not snarky or sarcastic and speaks to them as the internet wingwoman.”

Collins also sees part of her job as permissioning. She can tell men that it’s fine to wear tailored jeans or jewelry if that’s what they want. She also recognizes that if the first battle was getting men to give a shit, the second is getting them to make better choices.

“Just because men’s style has become more normalized and socially acceptable, that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to actually build a wardrobe you love,” Gabi Meyers, a personal stylist who works for Collins explains. “It’s easier than ever to get decision fatigue with limitless options.”

Tod, for instance, knows what he wants. Something between mod and blokecore. He’s a soccer fan whose parents emigrated from 60s Swinging London. He likes that Nutters Savile Row stuff. His Instagram algorithm has picked up on that, but he’s not totally sure what he’s looking at. Meyers stepped in and introduced Tod to Atom Retro, an online shop that reproduces mod brands, 80s casual, anything “retro.” Meyers also suggested shopping at Percival and Wax London – both of which have affiliate revenue programs – as well as the Montreal-based fashion house Simons (true patriot love from all your sons command).

Nick Gray, author of The Two-Hour Cocktail Party and founder of the service Museum Hack, which offers “renegade” tours at museums like the Met, came to Collins looking for more variation in his wardrobe. His current job is more public-facing than Tod’s, and more public-facing than his last one, given that he’s often traveling and promoting his book. He told SPY that he uses personal styling services because he feels overwhelmed.

For Tod and Gray, Collins is the right fashion middle-ground, underscoring that there’s a market for menswear education, rather than a stringent, expensive curation. If the din of men’s style discourse is getting louder and louder, some guys just want noise-canceling headphones. 

Down in Houston, Val Halfon is starting to see more male clients. Her service wasn’t built to entice men, but now it does. She says her few male clients used to be international. Now, she’s getting Americans looking for guidance, looking for help with all those options pushed by the algo. 

“American men have finally come around to a more progressive mentality, which focuses on the importance of their image to get ahead in the world — personally and professionally,” she said. “Perhaps men don’t like to shop anymore than they did 10 or 20 years ago, but now they understand they don’t have to do all the work themselves.”