In fashion terms, San Francisco men have a reputation, and you already know the one: the fleece vest, the free launch-week hoodie, the Bionny. It’s a lazy stereotype — this is, after all, the city that invented blue jeans — but it persists for a reason.
Walk through any neighborhood, and you’ll spot them: Men who have clearly cracked it. They aren’t braver or richer than their peers. They simply know something many local men don’t: how to shop, and where.
So we asked some of the Bay Area’s most sartorially minded shoppers for their picks for the best menswear in the city. The results span styles that have endured for more than a century, shops that have quietly helped steer the last two decades of taste, and garments so fresh they haven’t hit the mainstream yet.
Derek Guy, menswear writer, Die Workwear!
Favorite spot: Self Edge (opens in new tab), 569 Valencia St., Mission
If your algorithm has served you a single useful thought about clothes in the last three years, odds are it came from Derek Guy. The writer behind Die, Workwear! is the most influential menswear voice on X (opens in new tab) — a platform he calls an “absolute sewer shithole cesspool.” For all his commentary on the discourse, Guy’s actual expertise is clothes — and on where to buy them in this city, he’s unequivocal…