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Welcome to our IZEA interview series with influencers and marketers of all niches to highlight their journeys, share their insights, and inspire! Today we are influencing with Kelvin.

Influencing With Kelvin

Meet Kelvin Davis, a 34-year-old fashion and body-positive influencer and writer living in Columbia, South Carolina. He shares motivational content with readers of his Notoriously Dapper men’s fashion blog and his 113K Instagram followers. He has been recognized by the NAACP for his book, also titled Notoriously Dapper, a modern guide to being a gentleman. He began his blog in 2012 while he was an art teacher to inspire others to embrace who they are and be confident in their style. Since then he has signed with a modeling agency and worked with brands like Stitch Fix, DSW and Target. He’s also available to work with brands on Shake!

Thanks for chatting with us. In your own words, who are you and what do you do?

“I am Kelvin Davis, the founder of the body positive menswear blog Notoriously Dapper. I am a body positivity activist, style icon, influencer, model, public speaker and award-nominated author. I’m a father of two daughters. I’m also a plant dad. I started the blog in 2012 and it’s a blog that was really just created for men of all shapes and sizes to feel confident in themselves and help me along my own journey with self-confidence as well.”

What inspired you to start the Notoriously Dapper blog?

“I’ve always been into fashion so I wanted to have more business casual, dressier clothes. … I saw this red blazer (in a store) and they didn’t have my size, so when I asked the sales associate for another size she told me that they didn’t have any, and I was like, ‘Can you check another store, maybe check online?’ and then she told me that maybe I was just too big to stop there. It was my first time as a guy ever being body shamed. … I felt very insecure, very sad.”

“I couldn’t shake the feeling of feeling down about myself, and I’ve always been a pretty confident person, I thought. I just became really insecure. … I just feel like people needed an outlet to talk about body image. I’ve always wanted to start a fashion blog, but why not start a fashion blog with an actual purpose?

How did you get into modeling?

 “I’ve always wanted to be in the fashion industry, whether it was to be a model or a stylist or to be a designer. I’ve always wanted to be in some creative form of the fashion industry. Being in South Carolina, the fashion scene is not really the biggest here and I really didn’t have a lot of money to travel, so the whole modeling thing started with me posting my pictures on my blog. I started to realize about two years after posting on my blog, I’m pretty much giving an alternative to what other publications give. I’m giving them a different body type; I’m showing men and women that men of this stature can also look just as good. And then I started thinking to myself, “Why doesn’t this exist in the media? Why don’t they have different bodies in stores whenever I go shopping?’ I started to champion and talk about it more on my Instagram and blog — about how the fashion industry needs to have more representation in advertising. I didn’t think I was going to end up being the face of a brand. I didn’t think I was going to be a model, but that’s how the cookie crumbled.”

“I kind of stumbled into it. It wasn’t my initial goal. It came with this territory of, ‘Well, you’re talking about representation so how about you represent it?’”

Do you think there’s been an improvement in terms of representation of different body types?

“I feel like the women’s movement is thriving; I’ve seen women of all different shapes and sizes, women with disabilities, amputees, women in wheelchairs — I’ve seen so much diversity when it comes to the women’s side, but for men, I can’t say the same. … I’ve been a part of some campaigns where I’ll be the voice for body positivity and the bigger body, but then you look at everybody else, and there’s not much diversity. For the men’s (side) we have a long way to go. It’s very rare that you see a man that’s big and under 6 feet, they are always big and tall. It still needs a lot of work.”

What tips would you give someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?

“I’m a really big fan of using Instagram or using your social media platforms to advertise your entity or niche. … First of all you have to make your profile public. That’s number 1 because no one is going to find you on a private profile. The next step is you want to rebrand your Instagram account to be who you want brands to invest money in.”

Your username should be professional, he said. “You have to actually think about these things. Think of a name that you would name a blog or maybe just use your real name.”

“The reason why your iPhone costs so much is because of the technology of the camera and video, so you have a professional (tool) in your hand. You just have to know how to use it in the correct way. Even if you just snap photos of you wearing different outfits in different poses and maybe you tag a couple brands in the photo and use relevant hashtags, you’re able to be reached out to by some influencer or PR company that’s looking for a micro-influencer … and they stumbled upon you. It’s all about building those relationships.”

“I also tell (other influencers) to not do everything expecting money, because I didn’t need to start making money from influencing or blogging or any of this stuff until 2018. That’s six years after I started my blog. I did a lot of free things in exchange for gifting and doing that helped me build relationships with PR, brands, and other companies. … so when they were able to have the budget to pay me, or when I had the notoriety for them to feel I was worth the investment, they knew that they were going to get quality work. They were going to get a standup guy. I was going to be exact on deliverable dates. I wasn’t going to mess up anything. I was very convenient. I feel like that’s why a lot of brands want to work with me, because I am very convenient. I’d do things on time, I give them quality content, I’m easy to work with. If they don’t like something I’ll be more than happy to reshoot or redo it to give them whatever they want. At the end of the day, the content is for my page but also for the brand.”

“If you’re doing it for money you’re going to be very unhappy, because you’re not in it for the right reasons.”

Did you have an influence growing up that made you interested in fashion or dressing well?

“My mom and my dad. … My dad has been in law enforcement for 30-plus years now but when I was in middle school he was the chief of police of a town called Orangeburg. My whole life I saw him in a cop uniform; I never really got to see him dress up, so whenever he became the chief he was able to dress up and wear suits. So I remember my first time seeing my dad in this Navy pinstripe suit, tailored to the T. He had this light-blue collared shirt on and this golden-brown tie with a tie clip. His watch was showing on the sleeve. I remember in the seventh grade thinking, ‘Damn, my dad looks good. I want to wear that… I want to dress like that when I get older.’”

“I had always been into art but like meshing art with fashion really didn’t happen for me until about middle middle school and I would have to say it was that moment when I saw my dad leaving to go into his job, and I was like, ‘Dang!’

“And my mom has always been very fashion-forward. She’s always worn very bright colors. She has darker skin so she looks really good in yellows, reds and purples; she looks fantastic in them. Growing up I would always admire the way colors looked on her skin.”

“That and seeing my dad be so dapper and bold like that … really influenced me. I was very hands-on about picking my clothes.”

Did you go to school for art?

“I studied art education with a minor in oil painting.”

Do you still create art?

“I don’t create art as much as I used to when I was in college … but I definitely still have a talent. It’s still in me. I just use it now more toward the creative side of what I do with my blog and Instagram. I am very conscious of colors, the way things look in photos. … I feel like I do a really good job of doing that. A lot of people don’t understand the amount of thought that goes into photos. You can’t just take a picture of anything, anywhere. There has to be a certain way the photo has to be taken to put emphasis on whatever you’re trying to focus on. I mostly use my artistic creative for that. Maybe when I’m older and people don’t want me to model anymore, (when) people don’t value my opinion in fashion, maybe that’s when I’ll start painting again.”

What inspired you to write your book, “Notoriously Dapper: How to Be a Modern Gentleman with Manners, Style and Body Confidence”?

“There’s two things that really inspired me to write this book. The first thing was, whenever I was an art teacher — I taught from 2010 to 2018 — I taught at an inner-city middle school. A lot of single-parent homes, a lot of gang affiliation, a lot of troubled kids that needed a Black male to be a positive representation so they can see that there’s more to life than the life that they see out in the streets.”

“I wanted to write a book that young Black boys could read and be like, ‘OK, I can be all these other things. … I can be a lawyer. I can be a doctor. I can be a model. I can be an influencer. I can be an architect.” 

“For me it was getting them to understand that the job market goes beyond what they are taught in their community. And when I wrote the book I had them in mind the entire time.”

“I needed to write a book that if I was a seventh grade boy in their shoes, how would it change my perception of what I’ve already been taught?”

The second source of inspiration was what Kevin said was the need for “an etiquette book that’s written for not only young millennial men, but a millennial man of color.”

What keeps you going?

“My daughters. My oldest daughter is 11 and my youngest is 7. Now what really drives me is I want to be a positive representation for my daughter … so she can look at me and say, ‘I can do anything because my dad can.’”

What are your goals?

“I’ve accomplished a lot of the goals that I wanted to. One of my goals was to be in a Gap ad and I did a Gap ad in 2018, which was awesome. That was one of my lifelong goals.”

“And I wanted to be able to make a sufficient amount of money (influencing) to where I didn’t have to do anything else besides this job. But now my number one goal is to have a magazine cover story. I feel like my story from middle school art teacher to style icon is a very interesting story.”

“I have a lot of stories to tell. Me being a middle school art teacher in the inner city of Columbia and going to New York to shoot for Target and then flying back the next day to teach kids. And my students being aware of this, ‘Our teacher is a model … he shows up for us every day to teach us art still and teach us how to be better humans.’”

“Number two would be to have my own brand collaboration where I could collaborate with a brand on a capsule collection.”

“My third goal would be to do a very big activewear ad, like Nike, Adidas or Lululemon.”

What was it like being nominated for a NAACP Image Award?

“My book was nominated for most outstanding literature. It was really cool because it was the first time my name and Oprah will ever be in the same sentence, because Oprah was nominated, too, in that same category.”

“It was very special to me to be acknowledged by people of my own community for the work that I put in to help young Black boys be more confident and to understand that there’s more to life than what their community has taught them.”

Any other thoughts?

“I feel like social media in general can be very comparison driven and I want people to understand that — just like you can’t compare your life to anybody’s else’s — you can’t compare your Instagram feed to someone else’s feed, you can’t compare their brand collabs to what  your brand collabs are or their follower count to your follower count.”

Featured Photo by Kelly Keeley

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