When it comes to choosing outfits, women have countless tools at their disposal. TikTok OOTDs, Pinterest boards, and color theory inform a complex daily calculation about individual bodily geometry that ultimately determines if we want to wear the black shirt with jeans, or the other black shirt with jeans in a slightly different wash. It is often assumed that the process is more straightforward for men. A series of viral TikTok videos suggests that for one man, at least, this is a massive understatement.
On June 10th, Millie Judd debuted a social experiment on TikTok titled “Will My Boyfriend Pick Wherever I’ve Left A Gap In The Wardrobe?” For eight days straight, Judd, who is 23 and lives in London, opened a space between two shirts hanging in her boyfriend’s closet and and documented as Angus—every morning, without fail—eschewed the 30 other options in his closet and simply chose one of the shirts on either side of the gap. Millions of viewers followed along.
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“I honestly have no idea where the inspiration came from!” Millie tells GQ over email. “I was putting the washing away and it just popped into my head.”
For the first few days of the experiment, Angus alternated between the shirts on either side of the gap. There didn’t seem to be any kind of theme—his wardrobe appears to mostly consist of trendy t-shirts with various logos and designs that he pairs with shorts. But recently, Angus began favoring the shirts on the right, prompting commenters to submit suggestions for how to escalate the experiment. On day six, Millie threw a curveball, inserting two gaps in the wardrobe. Instead of completely malfunctioning, as some viewers worried, Angus ultimately chose the shirt on the right-hand side of the right-hand gap.
“Seems like he goes for light shirts and the one on the right!” one commenter observed. “Put a light on the left side and dark on the right to see!”
“You should put the ‘losing’ shirt in the gap for the next day and create a league table,” another suggested.
On day eight, viewers were in for an even bigger treat: Watching Angus in action. In the video, he walks up to the wardrobe and—in an impressive performance of the free will he erroneously believes he has—drums his fingers on the doors as he “chooses,” yet again, the shirt on the right of the gap.
Some people in the comments were convinced that Angus was secretly in on the joke, or was turning the experiment around on Millie to see her reactions. Millie believes these findings are just proof of her boyfriend being the “simpleton” she describes him as in video number one. But if you want to get intellectual about it, the results are examples of what experts in behavioral economics call “nudge theory.”
Popularized in Nudge, a 2008 book by Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein, nudge theory suggests the design of an environment can influence the decision-making of groups or individuals. It’s the thinking behind making renewable energy the default option for electricity and placing the healthy foods closest to the cash register at a store. While Millie’s experiment includes an unusually small sample size of one (1), the sheer consistency of her boyfriend’s choices make it hard to deny.
Angus is not on social media, which allowed Millie to operate in secrecy for as long as she did. There was one close call: In a video posted on June 15, Millie shared that a coworker had sent a screenshot of one of the videos to her boyfriend after it appeared on Twitter. When he showed it to her, she told him the video was just a funny clip of him humming.
“And I played the ‘weird’ card,” she says in the video. “‘Weird, weird, ooh that’s really weird. I don’t get it.’ And he was just kind of like, ‘Oh yeah, weird,’ and we haven’t spoken about it since.”
But Millie reveals to GQ that the jig is now up.
“Unfortunately, one of his friends has now informed him about the TikToks,” she says. “However, I honestly think it could’ve gone on for ages.”