Late last week, on the sidelines of a rooftop basketball court at a high school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Dylan Kelly’s slight frame, dressed in shorts, sneakers and a blazer, was hunched over his phone.
He could easily have been mistaken for a student at the school rather than a 26-year-old rising figure in the world of fashion commentary.
The Off White fashion show had ended minutes earlier — the fashion house had turned the high school’s rooftop into a sun-dappled, bubblegum-pink runway, drawing Ellie, the elephant mascot of the New York Liberty women’s basketball team, and the singer Ciara, among others — and Mr. Kelly had his work cut out for him. In the next hour or so, he was to write, fact check and memorize a script for a TikTok video about that show, which he would film on Off White’s runway.
At one point, as the audience was slowly filing out, Mr. Kelly plugged in his wired headphones and paced back and forth in a corner, reading his script out loud to himself.
Fashion commentary is not new for Mr. Kelly, a senior editor at Hypebeast who previously had internships at magazines like V and Paper and a stint as a sales associate at an Urban Outfitters. He’s found a modest audience on social media, where his minute-long videos attempt to explain fashion to young people.
In the videos, Mr. Kelly examines the historical and cultural significance of one fashion item at a time, like Coach’s oversize dino bag or Balenciaga’s chip clutch. He deliversthe soliloquies in a style similar to the cerulean monologue by Miranda Priestley from the movie “The Devil Wears Prada,” which itself is based on the inner workings of Vogue and its former editor in chief Anna Wintour. He then invites viewers to “walk” with him.
“I feel like my whole world has flipped upside down,” Mr. Kelly said in an interview held before the start of New York Fashion Week. “I’ve posted for fun on TikTok and Instagram — I’ve had an Instagram since I was, like, in high school — but I didn’t take it seriously in this way until, really, this year.”
It was only two months ago that Mr. Kelly posted his first “walk with me” video. Since then, he has gained 32,000 new followers, a talent agent, an endorsement from the rapper A$AP Rocky and access to some of the most coveted items in the fashion world, like a Louis Vuitton-branded flip phone bag charm that is not available for purchase. (The charm — an “archival, museum quality” phone, in Mr. Kelly’s words — was featured on Louis Vuitton’s runway earlier this year and was shipped to Mr. Kelly from Paris for his video. He had to send it back the next day.)
The idea for the videos came to him when he was out for dinner with his childhood friend Hailey Long, who helped him brainstorm ways in which he could stand out. “We both were just talking and it came out of nowhere,” said Ms. Long, who films Mr. Kelly’s videos — and who happens to work at a publicity agency that represents Off White.
Mr. Kelly’s work sits at the intersection of fashion influencing, in which content creators wear and style clothes or accessories (at the Off White show, Mr. Kelly was dressed in head-to-toe Off White), and TikTok expertise, where bag makers, seamstresses, stylists, colorists, makeup artists, dermatologists, pelvic floor therapists, historians and other self-proclaimed experts share from their specific font of knowledge.
The format carries an inherent tension that Mr. Kelly acknowledges.
“The platform feels so youthful and it feels like it dumbs down the idea of being an expert on there,” he said. “There’s no way that you can distill a 1,600-word think piece on quiet luxury that includes quotes from four different experts” for social media. And his monologues can be dense, often nodding at complex philosophical and abstract themes, like the retrofuturism of the current Louis Vuitton creative direction or the subversions of gender norms running through Dior’s men’s wear line.
At the same time, attention spans have shrunk, people are reading less and, if they do read something, they are often not completing it, something Mr. Kelly knows firsthand from his work in digital media. All of which makes experts and fact-tellers on social media more important, he said.
“If you’re not going to pick up a textbook on Alexander McQueen’s impact on fashion, maybe you can get the highlights in my video in one minute,” he said.
Mr. Kelly’s fashion lessons have found an audience not just among those who work in the industry but also among students aspiring to work in it, too, he said, with many reaching out to him with requests for videos on specific brands or items. He has also offered a showcase for student designers, like the South Korean fashion student Hyunwoo, whose video of an unfinished sample of his necktie jacket, strings hanging off and edges unfinished, was shared widely on TikTok.
Once Mr. Kelly had memorized his Off White “walk with me” script, Ms. Long helped style his hair and add concealer under his eyes. They bounced the script off each other. She hyped him up.
In just two tries and roughly 20 minutes of filming, he got what he needed. Then he sauntered off for a fashion week dinner party.
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
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