The Suit Is The Story: The Christopher Coleman Interview

Instagram’s @christophercoleman421 Brings Folk Art To The Doorman’s Uniform

By O.A. CARRY FOR: 65,000〡PUBLISHED: May 12th, 2025

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Christopher Coleman gets dressed every day like everyone else. One foot at a time. One tie at a time. One suit at a time. But it’s the nightly routine that sets him apart from the rest of us.

In the quiet zen of his apartment, he sets down a blank blazer. Hours later, smoke emits from his paintbrush. He wipes the sweat off his brow. His newest masterpiece bears the likeness of pop culture—movies, TV shows, anime and video games—but it’s been morphed together beautifully, like different colors of Play-Doh, all mashed into one ball, and then delicately shaped into a flat surface, colors spreading, forming an impressionist painting. But in this case, the painting is a suit that he wears.

He posts videos of himself wearing and telling the story of each “fit” on Instagram. Viewers keep coming back to one comment: “Modern-day folk art is alive and well.”

What’s immediately clear when you speak to Coleman is: he’s operating at a high media consumption rate and reflecting it all like a fun house mirror. The warped reflection, cast onto his suits, is an accurate representation of our modern times, more accurate than a normal mirror.

At least, that’s how his followers feel. But how does he see it?

We spoke to Coleman on Easter Sunday and realized that his stream of consciousness narrations are just the way that he talks. He just can’t help it, so much so that he gave us a few sneak peeks (at upcoming suits/stories) at the end of our talk.

Since that day, he’s gone viral again, drawing more people in and making them wonder…

Have you always been a storyteller?

Not really … So, years ago, when I met my best friend, I used to hang out with her kid and read her stories. She didn't like hearing the stories from books. She'd tell me to make stories up.

I guess it started there. I was just making up random stories on the spot, and now it's something far bigger and much more fun.

Where did you learn storytelling? Did someone teach you how?

No, I've just consumed so much media over the years, like TV, movies, cartoons, anime … I’m just merging everything into one cohesive story.

What about your drawing? Where did you learn to draw and why?

Nowhere [laughs]. When I was a kid, I sucked at drawing. My hands were always shaky. Everything looked terrible coming out. So I gave up on it until last year, when I was at a low point and nothing was really going on.

I was like, "Maybe I should give it another shot," and I did.

It turns out, it’s a natural talent that's just been lying dormant in me for years [laughs].

Drawing helped you get out of a low point?

Yeah, it's basically- You've heard the story a million times: a guy strikes out with a girl. But the thing is, I've been striking out with just about everything for years, so it was just building up and building up. I was just at the point where … Nothing was working. I had to try something completely different.

So, I tried this drawing on suits thing and crafting stories for it. It's completely different, totally fun! And I feel like I can control everything, so I can't lose [laughs].

How did storytelling and suits combine?

Originally, I saw this guy, we'll call him Seth Rollins, he’s a part of WWE, and every week on Monday, he would wear a different suit. At first, I didn't care, but then I saw one suit in particular that was shiny and black, and he had the glove that was also shiny, and the belt, and the shoes, and the hat.

And he was beating up somebody, and the crowd was singing his song, and I'm like, "Man, this is so cool. Can I do something like this in real life?"

So I started buying suits on Amazon, and then I was like, "This is boring. Maybe if I tell a story or have jokes with it, it’ll be better."

So I tried that out, and that was pretty cool, but then I was thinking, "You know what, these suits are kind of- They look nice, but if I made the suits myself, I could craft the story. The whole experience would be better if I made it myself."

So I tried that out, bought some paint from Blick Art Supply, started drawing, and I was surprised that my drawings were decent [laughs].

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What is it about the suit? Why did you choose it over other clothes?

Originally, it was because at work, I'm required to wear a blazer, so I figured I'd work within that basic guideline and design around that.

Yeah, I heard you work security, is that right?

Yeah, well, I work two jobs. I'm a concierge at a building in Cambridge. They love me there. I tell my stories, I show off my suits. It’s a great time. People are really nice. And then on Friday and Saturday, I do a doorman gig. It's nice, but I like the other gig better.

I've been in this line of work for a really long time, like 10 plus years now.

And what do you like about it? Is it sharing your suits with the people?

Absolutely! Making suits and pumping out stories is pretty much all I do anyways. I can share it with them, and they laugh, and they tell their friends. Then, they invite people over so I can do my demonstrations in front of them. It's a great time. I really like it.

Do you have some big fans at your workplace?

Oh yeah, I made a canvas, which I don't normally do, for one of the residents. There are a lot of younger kids too, who will come down just to hear my stories when I'm there.

It’s cool that it’s like your uniform.

Yeah, and I’m sure I could just paint on other types of clothing, but that seems boring, and I feel like everybody does that who's into designing on clothes. They'll use t-shirts and denim or whatever. I don't want to do that.

I'm going to stick with blazers. I feel like this is my thing.

So what comes first, the story, the suit? Do you draw it first on paper and then go for the outfit? Where does it start?

It's very rare for me to draw it out first. I want to say like 97% of the suits are rough drafts. I just start drawing on them [laughs] and go from there.

And how about the name of the outfit? When do you decide on that?

The name is always crucial [laughs]. So when I'm coming up with a story, I'm hoping that the name will come to me. I’ll give you an example.

My favorite blazer that I’ve made is "The Birds and the Bees." I was thinking of doing an Archer blazer, but I didn't really feel like drawing the Archer characters. And I wanted to do Petey Penguin at some point too.

I was thinking, I want to do a crossover with those characters, but I want the story to be adult, so … It'll be a hookup story.

Then I'm thinking, [now speaking like a diabolical plotter] "But what do I call this story in the end?" I'm like, "Wait, the characters … I got bird characters, and I’ve bee characters, so … The birds and the bees?’" I was like, "That's perfect! I love it. I gotta write all this down."

Petey Penguin was perfect because penguins are not cool. He can’t fly, so everybody rejects him. We'll frame the whole story around him [laughs], like he needs help meeting girls.

Then I was thinking about an episode of Archer, where they call some spies "honeypots." What if the secret agent I make is someone who disguises themself as a bee and she calls herself "Honey Pot." Ooh, this is perfect! And I'll make the suit look like a bee. It'll be yellow and black. [laughs] That's the origin of the two Archer characters I added, who I named Honey Pot and Wanna Bee.

Why do you use characters from TV, movies, video games and stuff like that in your work?

Because that’s all I've consumed [laughs]!

You got to go with what you know. All the characters that I know, I can put them in different situations on my suits that are totally off the wall.

Like with Temperance Brennan and Seeley Booth, I watched five seasons of Bones, like this is great, love it. But what if I take these characters and put them in space? We call it [he puts on a dramatic voice] Bones in Space. Oh man, it’s great.

And then, what would the story be? Okay, so we have some evil doctor who's on board and he's stealing bones, but what is his name going to be? It has to be a bone name. So I'm Googling "bones" [laughs]. I'm seeing fibula … Doctor Fibula. That's perfect! We'll go with that.

It's such a stream of consciousness. You're just pulling from your knowledge of all these different things you've seen, like you said.

How do you think pop culture subjects help your storytelling? Is it more for you, or is it for relating it to other people?

Oh, it’s definitely for me [laughs]. This is all for me. All of my personal enjoyments, just coming out … And I share it with people via social media and with the residents at work, so, they're lucky [laughs].

What inspired you to start sharing on Instagram?

So this Russian lady, she was like, "Chris, your stuff's nice, but you can't expect people to see you in person." I was wearing a different blazer Monday through Friday, and then they'd just go back in the closet forever. She said, "That isn’t fair. You should probably post your things online so everybody can see and appreciate them."

I was thinking, "You know what? You're right [laughs]. I've been stupid. Let's put this stuff online."

I see a lot of comments on your videos that read something like "Modern Folk Art is Alive and well." Have you reflected on these comments?

When someone wrote "This is the best thing on Instagram," I was like, "Whoa, isn't there porn on Instagram? You're saying I’m better than porn?" That's crazy [laughs].

But yeah, I'm not really sure. I don't have an art background. I never went to school for art. As I said before, I gave up on drawing when I was a kid, so I'm not really inspired by other artists. I don’t really know what other artists are doing right now, so I can't really say if I'm "the return to folk art" or not.

I have a quote here from the Museum of International Folk Art. It says that folk art recognizes that "traditions are dynamic" and that "traditional folk art may change over time and may include innovations in tradition," based on new "cultural aesthetics and social issues."

That’s kinda how I view your work, as folk art that’s utilizing and built on our modern media. Have you thought about this? Like, in your words, what "cultural aesthetics and social issues" do you think your work builds on?

If we went back to the King of the Hill blazer, that’s the first blazer that's really political if you think about it.

Because I started off with Starlink, which is Elon Musk, and he's talking about fighting corporate corruption and cutting wasteful government spending, blah, blah, blah.

And then you have Dale, who is a Republican, and he's trying to stop these aliens from hurting the president, which is good, but then he heralds Lee Harvey Oswald as a hero, and he doesn't want him working with the aliens. So if people stop and think about this, they might say, this is very political [laughs].

I guess you can consider this folk art.

I think that's a good example of how your work is addressing modernity. It's in this language that people understand, whether that's TV or a story that everyone knows, like the birds and the bees.

One of my favorite videos of yours is the Rose Gold suit, which is covered in apps, with roses on the back, and tells the story of a woman named Rose Gold who got the iPhone…

That’s based on the lady who went to jail for killing her mom with her boyfriend. I dunno if anyone knows that. It’s Gypsy Rose Blanchard. I changed the name to Rose Gold.

I had already made an iPhone full-body suit last year. I was like, let me do an update to that suit, but let's make it silly. Let’s talk about the iPhone 7 and how it was the last time the iPhone came in rose gold.

So I put roses on the back. They’ll tell the story about this lady who's obsessed with her rose gold iPhone [laughs].

I love this one because I imagine alien historians or something stumbling upon it and fully believing the "Legend of Rose Gold," and telling it to their children, and then the story morphs and takes shape like a big game of telephone.

[laughs] The stuff of legends …

Is this video's end goal to confuse future people?

[Laughs] No, it’s just because I wanted to tell that particular story. I wasn't planning on confusing people later on down the line, but if that happens, awesome.

Yeah, I definitely wanted to touch on the Birds and the Bees suit, but you kinda got to that earlier. It’s really amazing. I love all the little puns like the "flight plan," the subtle Hawk Tuah reference. I like that you say he needs a "wingman." All that stuff is so fun.

And the best part, I think, besides the name, is on the sleeves where they're getting attacked by "Ha-Te."

Yeah, that was kind of confusing to me. Was that supposed to mean "hot-ty" or something?

No, so I figured when I told this story at work, I couldn’t keep saying, "hate," over and over again, so I separated the word.

So that's the Black Hawk's mission, to spread hate, and they're fighting him using the power of love … It’s a callback to the Guardians of the Galaxy number one at the end when they join their hands and they beat the Big Bad using the power of friendship.

[Laughs] There was one guy in the comments, he was like, "What do you mean by ‘ha-te?’" And his girlfriend said, "It means hate. Your mind is cooked." I just couldn't stop laughing.

I want to talk about one of your older videos where you referenced French artist Gina Pane and described her doing what you do at an art gala. I looked into this. That didn't happen, right?

No, I made that up [laughs]. Is that the one wear I strip?

Yeah, you start in your big fur coat.

The script is so interesting. "She went in wearing multiple layers of clothing and, one by one, she slowly took off each layer, while telling a lengthy monologue, full of jokes and puns. And no one really understood the jokes or the puns, but it was all to build excitement for the big reveal at the end."

That’s what I do! Except the stripping off clothes. I don't do that except for maybe a couple of videos.

But yeah, this idea that she then "revealed the climax" and then she "taps her lower lip three times, does a 360 spin and says in a calm, soothing voice, ‘This is your moment of Zen.’" Then, that’s the name of the outfit [Moment of Zen].

Does this script describe how you view what you're doing, like this "moment of Zen" and the "climax?"

So, the "Moment of Zen," that is from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He would always end with "This is your moment of Zen."

And what I do is basically a combination of Jon Stewart’s show and The Colbert Report … Like, you take a concept, you dive in real deep, funny, lots of puns, and then you end it.

Colbert would say, "And that's tonight's word," but I say, "And that’s the name of tonight's fit" [laughs].

In that particular video, I was making it overly sexual for fun by stripping off layers of clothing until I hit the climax [laughs].

Why do your videos resonate with people?

Because they've never seen anything like this before [laughs], and they're funny, especially the ones with the puns, like "The Birds and the Bees," or "Birds of a Feather Flock Together," or "Honey Pot and Wanna Bee star in, Just Another Bee Movie." [Laughs]

Yeah, stuff like that is hard to top.

So what's next for you and and the page?

More awesome suits, more Honey Pot, more Wanna Bee. A follow-up to the Vampire Diaries is coming up. More Petey Penguin at some point. Yeah, I got to do something with Gerald the Giraffe, gotta figure him out.

You guys got a lot of good stuff coming down the pipeline.

Like … Okay … Everyone talks about Jesus, but no one really talks about his mom, the Virgin Mary. What did she do before he was born? We're going to find out. It turns out she was pretty much the talk of the town. Everybody loved her, everybody tried to get with her, but she didn't have time for them. She was just doing her own thing, having fun. And no matter how many times people tried to get into her life, she just pushed them away, and they loved her even more. And by the time she became the chosen one, everybody, they would all say the same thing about her, there was Something about Mary.

That's a new one?

That's an exclusive one, yeah.

There was a movie back in the nineties: There’s Something About Mary. I think it starred like Cameron Diaz. Anyway, all these guys are throwing themselves at her, and she wasn't really interested. So basically that's the idea, but with the Virgin Mary.

Do you have any more sneak peeks?

Okay, I'll give you one more.

I saw this thing online where it's a suit, a full-body suit, it has circles on it. I'm thinking, I should do something like that, but on the back we'll have some characters, maybe they've been kidnapped by the Riddler. We’ll tell the story about how they fight him. They put him in jail. He gets back out. They put him back in. And it's just like that, going through the motions, going through life. You start as a kid. You grow older. You get old. You have kids. Pass on … And on the front, in the circles, it says "IFE" all over the suit, and the lapel is the "L word," and the name of the suit is going to be The Circle of Life …