“As a gay person I felt safe there”: How Scandinavia claimed the OG influencer Bryanboy

It’s the last day of Paris Fashion Week and Bryanboy’s hotel room looks like a high-end flower shop. Bouquets bloom from every available surface, some wrapped in elaborate tissue, others set in elegant glass vases. The cards read Chanel, Bottega Veneta, Dior’s Kim Jones. Jonathan Anderson, creative director of Loewe, even wrote his note by hand. “Honestly, this is nothing. A lot of them already dried up so I got rid of them,” Bryan says. “My room looked like a funeral home.”

And then there are the clothes. Racks upon racks of wares from the likes of Hermès, Valentino and Celine. Two large Chanel shopping bags (he bought six jackets and two coats) are tucked into the corner. It’s been a chaotic month – first New York, then London, Milan and finally Paris, where he capped off his trip by shooting the editorial of this magazine. Tomorrow he’ll hop on a flight to Stockholm, the city he has called home for five years, where he’ll spend a rare 24 hours with his husband, and then it’s off to Berlin followed by a quick jaunt in the Philippines, where he was born. I ask him how he maintains his energy. “A lot of cigarettes, a prayer and a miracle,” he says.

He’s glad to be back at it; as someone who has made a living documenting his fabulous jet set life for nearly two decades, Bryan was hit particularly hard by the pandemic. In March 2020, he returned home from fashion month and suffered an “existential crisis”. “Every single job I had from March to September cancelled,” he says. So he started a TikTok account just to pass the time. “I thought, everyone’s talking about Tik Tok, why don’t I join?” He had previously gone on record saying he would never – touting the platform as “an app for 16-year-olds”. Today he has four million followers.

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Bryanboy, born Bryan Yambao, made his first blog post from his parents’ home in Manilla when he was 21 years old. The year was 2003, and he had just been to Thailand and Russia on vacation. “There was no Facebook, there was no Instagram – the idea of social media didn’t exist,” he says. So, under a Blogspot page titled for his AOL screen name, he started documenting his travels so his friends could keep tabs on his whereabouts. In today’s attention deficient landscape, the format sounds rather insane. “You post 20 or 30 pictures, you write a novel – 2,000 or 3,000 words – and you call it a night,” he recalls. Still, from the very beginning, the content was underscored by that distinctly Bryanboy tone. As he puts it, “I love to exaggerate, I love telling stories.” In his first post, Bryan complained, emphatically, about the price of excess luggage.

It was silly. It was funny. So his friends sent the link to their friends, and they sent the link to their friends. Before Bryan knew it, he had built a small audience. “I’m looking at the statistics obsessively,” he says. “I went from having four to five readers a day to 35 readers a day to 2,000 readers a day, in like a month.” In those days, that was an unimaginable number of people and Bryan wanted to keep their attention. So he made the first of many pivots; he stopped treating the blog like a personal diary and started writing about fashion.

Bryan came to fashion instinctively as a young boy. On the bus home from school, he would read, obsessively, his mother’s issues of Vogue, which, by the time they reached the Philippines, were usually “three or four months old”. “I would just immerse myself in that world,” he says. It wasn’t just the fashion images that piqued his fascination, but the coded hints towards the mechanics of the industry itself. The names of editors and stylists. The prices in the credits.

“I was always curious how the images are made, how shoots are done,” he says. “But I just had this impression that it was this exclusive world that I really have no place in.” To his mind, “fashion belonged to the West”. Still, his mother indulged his “healthy obsession”, and soon he was reading not only Vogue but also Bazaar, Dazed and i-D. “It didn’t cost as much as my obsession with Chanel,” he says, wearing a Chanel tweed jacket.

Before long, Bryan, along with a fresh crop of fashion bloggers, was welcomed into the world he so admired by way of formal invitations from brands to their fashion shows. Marc Jacobs even named a bag after him. However, the reception wasn’t universally warm. “There were a lot of articles about the industry not fully accepting bloggers,” Bryan recalls. Established fashion journalists feared that bloggers would undermine their work or, worse, replace them all together. Some insisted blogging would be a passing trend. “But here we all are. We’ve evolved onto Instagram.” Today, Bryanboy.com links to Bryan’s Instagram. There is no archive of the site that made him an industry superstar. “I’m not nostalgic,” he says. “I’m always looking forward to creating new content.”

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“He’s seriously one of the most fun people to be around that I’ve ever met,” Rumi Dowson (née Neely) tells me when I ask her to describe Bryan. Rumi and Bryan came up side by side; her blog, Fashion Toast, oozed an enviable California cool beloved internationally (full disclosure: her impact on me was so profound, I once dyed my hair to copy hers). After meeting front row at a fashion show, the two bloggers instantly clicked and have remained close friends ever since.

“What I cherish about him and appreciate beyond words is how he is in his unplugged time,” she says. “He’s such a good, consistent friend. Some of my favourite moments with him have just been in the middle of nowhere on a road trip or waiting hours for a rental car in an airport –he can make any random situation fun and memorable.”

Twelve years ago, during Stockholm Fashion Week, a chance encounter dramatically altered the course of Bryan’s life. He was eating dinner with friends at Stockholm institution Sturehof when a man at a neighbouring table told Bryan and his party to pipe down. “Me being with my friends at night – we’re loud,” Bryan says. “So he’s like, ‘Excuse me, can you lower your voice?’.”

The man, a Swedish banker, wasn’t necessarily Bryan’s type, but they got to talking any way and wound up exchanging numbers. A few weeks later, they ran into each other by chance, at Hotel Costes in Paris. “I was like, ‘Oh, you’re the guy that shushed me in Stockholm’,” Bryan recalls. Seven years ago, they tied the knot. Today they share a house in Mälarhöjden and a miniature pincher named Bettina.

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Though he spends most of his time ping ponging between various fashion weeks and other professional engagements, Stockholm is Bryan’s home; last year he became a Swedish citizen. It was a city he was always drawn to. “As a gay person, I felt safe there,” he says. He doesn’t speak the language fluently, but he’s trying, often using TikTok to practice. Shortly after arriving permanently in Sweden, he even dyed his hair blonde. “I used to dye my hair black every 10 days. I have a lot of grey hair,” he says. He adopted his now-signature look out of pure convenience. “I don’t even know what my real hair colour is. It’s probably Anderson Cooper.”

Stockholm is also where Bryan keeps his stuff, and boy does he have a lot of it. “I have eight storage units,” he says. “And then in the house, the third floor was a hoarder ’s situation where you can’t walk – there’s no floor surface.” During the pandemic, his husband gingerly issued “an ultimatum”, saying “maybe, well, perhaps since all your gigs got cancelled and you’re not doing anything, you can look into letting go of some of your things”.

He parted with a Prada sweater or two, but that was the end of it. Rumour has it he has dozens of Birkins and even more Chanel bags. “This is what happens when you grow up in a developing nation,” he says. In his youth, he spent years begging for a Prada backpack that never materialised (eventually his parents relented and bought him a Louis Vuitton Speedy).

“With my parents teaching me the value of money and not wasting it on non-essential things, it just kind of traumatised me to an extent,” he says, playfully. “But it kind of taught me one day, when I’m working, when I’m self-sufficient, I can treat myself the way I want to be treated.” If you run into him at ICA, he’s likely to be wearing Chanel.

Though the platform has changed, Bryan’s tone has remained more or less consistent in the 20 years he’s been producing content. There’s observational humour and wit. There’s an edge of satire – like he's subtly winking at both himself and the world in which he operates. More than occasionally, there’s a socially-conscious standpoint; years ago, long before industry watchdogs Diet Prada coined the phrase “call it out”, he called out Prada for their lack of diversity in their casting. More recently, he called out Stockholm restaurant Riche for displaying overtly racist artwork. A day later, the artwork was removed. I ask if he’s suffered any consequences for any of his posts – perhaps a rescinded invitation or a cancelled brand partnership. “No, not necessarily, which is really quite amusing because of my relationship with brands,” he says. “I’ve called them out many, many times.”

There’s an authenticity to Bryan’s lack of filter that many people emphatically respond to. He doesn’t just have followers, he has fans – folks screaming his name and clamouring to take selfies. Some have been with him since the very beginning. “Instead of treating my audience as followers, I kind of build a community,” he says.

Does he ever get anxiety before uploading? “Never.” As it turns out, TikTok is the perfect place for Bryan’s brand of playful output. His success on the platform has re-solidified his status in the culture – a foothold he’s miraculously never lost. In some ways he’s the master of reinvention, but in the most significant ways he’s always been the same Bryanboy. Perhaps he’s just the master of the pivot.

Rumi also uses that word – pivot – in describing Bryan’s staying power. “Whenever I describe Bryan to people I use the term ‘superhuman’. He’s just tireless, fearless, and perpetually able to morph and pivot while absolutely remaining himself,” she says. “His love for and knowledge of the fashion world surpasses that of anyone else I’ve met and he expresses himself with such playful intelligence that it makes his appeal relevant on any platform.”

He may not look it, but Bryan is 40 years old. During the pandemic, he considered slowing down – “Maybe I don’t have to go to cruise,” he mused – but once the shows started up again he changed his mind. “I’m part of the system,” he says. “People like Suzy Menkes, Cathy Horyn, Vanessa Friedman – all the greats – have been doing it forever. They still go to the shows.”

At the end of the day, Bryan finds joy in what he does and that joy is contagious. “I love that I can be funny and make people happy,” he says, simply. And when he needs a brief respite, he returns to the Swedish suburbs where he revels in grocery shopping, long walks in nature, hanging out with his hubby. Here, he isn’t Bryanboy, but just Bryan. Soon he may not even be the most influential member of his household; his dog has over 2,000 followers.