Raw denim on the decline and questionable evidence for a preppy revival

Analysing men's fashion chats on reddit + quant reddit analysis tutorial

cover photo is two of my favourite men’s fashion creators @diordowell and @aaronmacpepple

Reddit gets a bad reputation — often referred to as a place for chronically online keyboard warriors, conspiracy theorists, and incels (especially when we get to men’s only spaces) by people who don’t use the platform.

And yes, while those things exist and the space can get a bit dodgy, the lack of advanced fyp algorithms and the ability to sink into all sorts of niches makes it such a *wonderful* space (hear me out).

On other apps, the chances that the words of a person reaches you is predestined by a follower count and an algorithm. Reddit instead offers a place to read the thoughts and feelings of (normal) people who didn’t have to do the demoralising dance of growing an audience.

That may be why (and this isn’t my own research — it’s being lifted from @Amy Francombe’s piece on men’s fashion reddit) 71% of people in the UK went to Reddit at some point when researching a product to buy (according to a 2025 Reddit survey of 12,000 monthly users)

Unfortunately, this is why reddit is a common analysis I have done at various consumer/market research jobs to appease the corporate requests for the thoughts/feelings/behaviours of [x] audience — at this point I’ve offered insights on everything from babycarriers to bitcoin.

Men’s fashion reddit offers insights into what men are wearing, looking for, and needing advice on. Of course, the quantitative insights you can get from this are limited to:

• How many times a piece/brand/concept was mentioned

• How the discussion has changed over time (is it increasing or decreasing, and we can do stats on this)

• The sentiement associated with the piece/brand/concept

• How these phrases co-occur

However, this does give us a nice overview of the overarching trends and discussions happening in these communities.

So now that I’ve (hopefully) convinced you of the utility of analysing Reddit, let’s get into how to do it + what came out of this analysis.

There are a few different ways to extract data from Reddit, the first is by creating and using your own reddit api credentials to scrape specific discussion threads (all the comments under a post) using Python. This can be incredibly useful when you want to tap into a discussion around a particular topic.

In case you aren’t super familiar, I decided to annotate the code within the code, so that you have the notes if you are following along with the script in your own console.

My notes in the script are all proceeded by a #.

It’s also spaced out a lot for readability in Substack.