Walking through SoHo with Maurice Kamara, you get the sense that he is judging every outfit he sees.
“Nice fit,” he told someone sitting on a bench outside Balthazar last month.
“I like your fit,” he said to another gentleman he passed crossing Broadway in Lower Manhattan.
On these walkabouts, he is appraising creativity, whimsy and confidence through the way people style their clothes. Often, he likes to ask strangers — and, increasingly, celebrities — about their outfits on camera, posting the videos on his Instagram account the People Gallery, which has over a million followers.
Kamara — a self-identified “shoe person” — looks for “that one piece” that elevates an outfit into double-take territory. “I appreciate people who wear their stories,” he said.
The People Gallery is, at its core, a document of personal style. The account has featured Kim Kardashian, Jacob Elordi, Ye, Karol G, Anna Wintour and Teyana Taylor mostly looking their red carpet best. But interspersed among the people whose faces are usually seen on movie posters or smiling at the Met Gala are video interviews with everyday people whose outfits simply happened to catch his eye: An interior designer. A real estate broker. A mayor.
In each video, Kamara, 39, tends to ask about the inspiration behind the person’s outfit, how the look came together and then a disarming question or two.
His question to Michael B. Jordan: “What’s your favorite movie?”
To Jeezy: “What’s your favorite meal?”
To Margot Robbie: “What’s your favorite song at the moment?”
The videos can function as a palate cleanser, revealing a familiar celebrity in a fresh light, and may even inspire viewers to put on their own best outfits to go to work, pick up their children or head out for a stroll. The clips are short in length — usually under a minute — and can feel a bit voyeuristic. You may have seen Elordi at the Oscars, but did you see him after? Kamara did.
The posts come off as spur of the moment, but in reality, they typically require a decent amount of planning — or waiting. In order to capture Jordan fresh off his Oscar win, for instance, Kamara had to wait for hours for the star to emerge from an after-party. Even then, Jordan was not keen on the interview until Kamara showed his Instagram page.
“A lot of people don’t know that it’s a lot of work,” Kamara said. “Celebrities could even know who I am and love my work, but that doesn’t mean that you will get the video from them that day.”
Kamara’s first fashion gigs were in retail, having spent most of his working life employed at clothing stores: H&M, Rag & Bone, Foot Locker, Stuart Weitzman, Michael K, Niketown, Adidas.
“The only job I have had that was not in fashion was at a movie theater when I was 15,” he said.
Each job taught him something different.
“I always had a passion for fashion,” Kamara said. “I could never keep a job because I wanted to be in the streets, but I always liked putting outfits together.”
In 2021, while working as a store manager for IRO Studio, a Paris-based fashion brand, Kamara saw a stylishly dressed man on the Upper East Side and decided to take a video of his outfit. Traffic in the store was still slow from the pandemic, and he needed something to entertain himself.
That same year, he came across the Brazilian influencer Magá Moura in SoHo. He made an outfit video, and she reposted it. Almost immediately, he saw his follower count start to shoot up.
“I gained 30,000 followers right away,” he said. “It let me know that what I was doing was impressive and they gave me more confidence to keep doing it.”
With more followers came brand deals — past partners have included Nike and Chanel — and an easier time making the case to a celebrity for a video.
According to Nikki Cruz, a marketing agent with the spirits company Diageo, which hired Kamara for a Crown Royal event, Kamara’s authenticity helped distinguish him from other influencers eager to work with brands.
“His content was very different,” Cruz said in a phone interview. “I think the personality is really important. There’s so many people doing this type of content now, but he was definitely more at the forefront.” The conversations that Kamara has with his subjects are “so simple, but they feel very relatable,” she added.
Nike, one of Kamara’s biggest clients, appreciates being able to take a hands-off approach.
“We really just let him do his thing, and that’s where he does his best work,” said Lynne Bredfeldt, a senior spokeswoman for Nike. “For us, it’s not about the follower count. It’s about the way that he genuinely is able to connect with the artist or athlete and to make it his own versus it coming from us.”
Being a content creator is not how Kamara saw his life panning out. After his mother died when he was 1, he spent most of his childhood and adolescence in foster care in New York. (He never knew his father, and a grandmother and an aunt lived in Liberia.) Kamara often found himself hanging out in Brooklyn, not going to class. His truancy kept him from finishing high school.
“I never in a million years thought this would be my life,” he said. He was wearing Chanel jeans, a Cartier watch and a $12,000 intrecciato leather bomber jacket from Bottega Veneta.
Now, he is so popular that even the toughest personalities are encouraged to submit to his man-on-the-street interviews. When he found himself face to face with Ye at a Marni fashion show, Bianca Censori, the rapper’s wife, vouched for Kamara and nudged her husband to do the video.
“That is why I thanked her at the end of the video,” Kamara said.
When he encountered Oprah at a Chanel fashion show in Paris, her entourage was pushing him away until he walked up to her and showed her his page.
“She said: ‘OK! Let’s do it!’” Kamara said.
Celebrities like Elordi take a bit more time to get through, Kamara said. After bumping into each other on several occasions, Elordi agreed to do a video, albeit a short one.
“Jacob hates the internet, but he did it for me because that is my guy,” Kamara said.
“In order to do these things, you have to go far and beyond. You can’t take no for an answer. You just got to break through. The way you break through is by having this belief, like I have, in what I’m doing.”
With the People Gallery’s success, Kamara is now regularly invited to fashion shows so he can create content for brands. It is the kind of promotion that cosplays as organic.
“Now you see other people coming up after me and they do not have the same success,” Kamara said. “I don’t want them to look at this like this is a hustle.”
On a Wednesday afternoon in April, he was at Soho House waiting for Kevin Hart to show up for a planned video. After Kamara was tipped off to Hart’s arrival, he took the elevator down to the street. Hart hopped out of a black Cadillac Escalade, also in Bottega, and made a beeline toward Kamara with his hand out for a shake. Kamara’s phone was in front of his face.
“Hey, how you doing today?” Kamara opened up.
Less than five minutes later, after a staccato flurry of questions, the filming was done. Kamara was buzzing, his adrenaline practically seeping through the woven leather of his jacket.
On to the next fit video.
