"I am such a nerd, it's ridiculous. I have to have the newest and the best," said Sledd, 23, whose "Ask a Gay Man" videos make up one of the all-time most-subscribed YouTube channels. "Like my favorite thing to do is get a new piece of technology and read the manual cover to cover."

Little did Sledd know that he'd one day be crediting such technology--an iMac, the Internet and a wildly popular video streaming site--for his rise to fame as the cyberworld's style maven.

Little did Sledd know that he'd one day be crediting such technology--an iMac, the Internet and a wildly popular video streaming site--for his rise to fame as the cyberworld's style maven.

Sledd's flamboyant, witty and brutally honest videos about everything from the evils of toe rings to the virtues of purses for men have attracted 66,836 YouTube subscribers.

His weekly installments--most of which are self-filmed and edited in his bedroom--are also now featured as part of Bravo's OutZoneTV.com site. And the YouTube video that got him noticed--Denim Edition--has been viewed more than 3 million times.

Sporting a distinctive hairstyle, Sledd starts each video with his friendly signature greeting, "Hey bitches!" but he doesn't hold back and his opinions are strong, if not occasionally harsh. Among his fashion pet peeves are overalls and skinny jeans (unless you're "a skinny bitch"), wearing socks with sandals, and showing your "muffin top" (i.e., the bulge that oozes out over low-rise jeans).

Explaining Sledd's Web appeal, Jason Klarman, Bravo's executive vice president for marketing and digital, said Sledd is funny, colorful, relatable, entertaining, educational and "has a real point of view. That's a great combination. You never walk away from one of his videos without having learned something...I never knew what a muffin top was."

He's also an example of a relatively new type of celebrity--a la Lonelygirl15--born on the Internet into a community that feels like it knows him intimately, said Larry Weintraub, CEO of Los Angeles-based Fanscape, a new-media marketing agency.

"We like him because he's saying what we're thinking," Weintraub said, adding that Hollywood needs to recognize consumer demand for such homegrown Web content or it will miss out. "The Internet has made a platform where anyone can become a star."

Growing up in Paducah, a one-mall western Kentucky town of about 26,000 people, Sledd said consumer electronics always played a big role in his life. He was the second person in his eighth-grade class to sport a cell phone and the first on the block to enter AOL chat rooms via dial-up.

It wasn't until middle school that he discovered The Gap, "and that's when my passion for fashion began," said Sledd, who last month left his job as a manager of the Gap in the Kentucky Oaks Mall to clear his plate for video making (not to mention travel, agents, publicists, reporters, e-mail and the like).

A recent Macintosh convert and subsequent Apple evangelist, Sledd described the purchase of his iMac--after years on a PC--as another pivotal milestone.

"I hate black electronics. Isn't that funny? I absolutely refuse to buy black electronics," Sledd said, explaining one factor in his decision to buy a white iMac. "I spent the next four days reading every tutorial that was ever made about a Mac before it even got here."

That's when Sledd's two worlds collided. After his sister tipped him off to YouTube in June 2006, he decided to take the fashion advice he was giving customers by day and put it up in a video blog. He'd work on his footage by night using nothing but the camera and editing tools on his iMac, he said.

Copyright: news.com



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