Just Like Japanese Denim, Drew Joiner Is All About the Details

 Drew Joiner’s first love wasn’t Japanese denim. Or footwear. Or fashion at all.It was fossils.When he was a kid, he wanted to be a paleontologist. He definitely didn’t think he’d be just shy of hitting 1 million cumulative followers across his YouTube, TikTok and Instagram accounts through videos like “12 Things That Instantly Make You More Stylish” and “Vintage Shopping in Japan” to “Clothing I Regret Buying…” and “I Wore the Same Jeans for 100 Days Straight.” Growing up in Denver, the now-27-year-old digital content creator didn’t become passionate about fashion until he was a senior in college – at the University of Denver where he studied marketing and played Division 1 basketball. The sport sits as Joiner’s second childhood love alongside his segue into the fashion world. “Basketball has a distinct aesthetic value,” says Joiner, an avid sneaker enthusiast throughout his college basketball career. “I cared about sneakers, but I figured, ‘I can’t just have nice sneakers and not have an entire outfit to match the vibe,’” he continues, comparing it to basketball once again, noting that the sauciest basketball players’ swagger can be traced all the way down to the headphones. Joiner kept a close eye on these subtle details – pant silhouettes, sneaker lacing and audio accessories included – and began to develop his personal style once he graduated college. Sneaker culture dominated the zeitgeist then, with Joiner staying tapped in with the hype heavy-hitters of the time like Supreme and Palace and emulating the looks of Kanye West, Virgil Abloh and Jerry Lorenzo. Julius Ignacio Having decided that basketball wasn’t the career path he wanted to pursue, Joiner pivoted to building his career as a fashion creator, teaching himself the basics of technical editing and “learning everything [he] could about the fashion world through the internet.” Joiner says it was the internet that invited him into the fashionverse, “allowing [him] to step into a world that [he] otherwise wouldn’t have been able to step into.” “I’ve always interacted with fashion in an online sense,” he explains, setting a rather sleepy portrait of 2010’s Denver, a mellow metropolis sans a thriving fashion scene. When COVID-19 hit, Joiner doubled down on his content creation, inspired by the new influx of approaches to digital media brought on by the pandemic. Still living in Denver at the time, Joiner – who found significant inspiration in Bobby Hundreds’ This Is Not A T-Shirt – launched his first foray into the fashion content sphere in 2020 with his Beyond the Garment podcast, which wrapped its fourth season in December. “I wanted to learn more and ask all of the questions I had,” Joiner explains of his main motivation behind the creative venture, which gave him the platform to reach out to creative directors, designers and small business owners he respected to pick their brains on the ins and outs of t