Braden Peters was a normal kid once. For the most part, his childhood was “probably the same as anyone else,” he tells me. “There’s not a lot of deviation between five-year-olds, you know?” He grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, with a businessman father and a mother who used to be a bodybuilder. He had a little sister. There was a dog. His family would often go skiing, and every summer, they’d visit Cape Cod in Massachusetts and hang around the beach.
But Peters was a hyperfixator. When he got hooked on something, he committed. He liked Nerf guns, so he bought tons of them. He was briefly very into politics. His family had a home gym, and he started working out. Soon, he was watching Rich Piana videos on YouTube, digging into More Plates More Dates and bodybuilding forums, and looking up posts about shoulder blades and shoulder-to-waist ratios. Then he found Looksmax.org, the website that would change his life.
In the last few months, Braden Peters has stopped being Braden Peters. He has evolved into a supernatural creature known only by his online handle, Clavicular. Named after the clavicle— also known as the collarbone—Clavicular has become the face of the looksmaxxing community, a cohort of painfully online young men who obsess over physical self-improvement in the hope that it’ll improve their dating odds.
Clavicular took it further than anyone else: he claims to have smashed his face with a hammer to make bones regrow sharper, smoked meth to curb his appetite, and performed “dick-ups” by placing weights on his penis to maximize girth and erection strength. At age 14, he’s said, he began injecting testosterone he’d ordered from the internet, with no parental or medical oversight. Now his body can’t naturally produce it; he believes he’s currently infertile.
He has also mastered clipfarming, the strategy of doing such unhinged things on livestream that they get clipped and go viral on social media. In his Truman Show-esque daily streams, he gleefully says slurs and brutally eviscerates women’s looks. Just before Christmas, he appeared to hit a guy with a Cybertruck while streaming and driving, and said on camera that he hoped the guy had been killed. (No charges were filed.) In January he popped out to a Miami club with the Avengers of far-right dorks and danced to Ye’s “Heil Hitler.”
Over the last few months, he’s been called everything from the “greatest performance artist alive” to a “mentally ill meth addict” and compared to a picaresque-novel protagonist who “bounces from one thing to another without suffering any real consequences or learning anything from the experience.” He’s gone from New Jersey nobody to Miami frat boy to, suddenly, the toast of the reactionary downtown scene. Last week was his peak—his Manhattan debut, which included a surprisingly credulous New York Times profile, a glamorous runway walk, and multiple fashion afterparties. We were backstage as all the chaos unfolded.
Right up until the day it happened, Clavicular’s fashion debut was in doubt. He was set to walk in a show by Elena Velez, the Midwest designer known for dressing online it-girls and controversial characters from the downtown Dimes Square scene. But then Clavicular got arrested while livestreaming at a bar in Scottsdale, Arizona, and police found a fake ID, along with an Adderall pill and a steroid. Then, just a day before the fashion show, Arizona prosecutors dropped his case “due to no reasonable likelihood of conviction,” per the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. He immediately flew to New York.
When I find Clavicular at the fashion show hours before it kicks off, he’s huddled on a dark leather couch next to a woman with bleached eyebrows who’s injecting him with the cell-repairing peptide NAD+. This is being livestreamed to over 10,000 people on Kick, the less-moderated rival to Twitch. Clavicular’s right-hand man Brock stands a few feet away with a large camera, while his fellow chiseled looksmaxxer Drago, real name Ioritz Eguileor, sits nearby, along with their solemn security guard, a man named Joe who hails from Jamaica, Queens. The woman is educating Clavicular about the voodoo magic of vabbing (“vaginal dabbing”), or applying pussy juice to one’s pulse points to lure in men. “The girls have to make sure they have a pretty primo cunt to be getting away with that,” Clavicular says, baffled.
Clavicular streams the entire pre-show process for his fans, from fitting to hair and makeup to dress rehearsal. The show is vaguely themed around artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and surgical brutality. Models walk with bandages wrapped around their faces; one woman wears a corset with a metal frame that looks half-melted by radioactive bile. Clavicular is a good muse for a show concerned with “people’s almost suicidal desire or impulse to be beautiful.” But it feels like he’s mostly been brought in as a gag, an opportunity for both Velez and Clavicular to produce what he describes as “infinite clip glitch” and a 100-acre “clip farm.” His outfit is a crumpled white waxed cotton shirt, so it looks like he’s soaking wet, which sends the chat into hysterics: “DRENCHED IN CUM FIT.” “SOAKED IN DRIPPING NUT.”
Clavicular spends most of the pre-show making fun of the whole thing, cracking jokes about the models (“Am I the only dude born a dude here?”) and freaking out when he finds out he’s supposed to wear a wig. “I fucking hate this shit,” he says after they slick back his hair. “It’s trash.” He gets agitated when a Spanish influencer starts speaking Spanish in front of him: “I don’t like when people talk in Spanish, because it’s like, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on.” Under the abrasive exterior, though, he’s clearly geeked to be here. While some reactionaries see high fashion and runway shows as sissy shit, it’s catnip for looksmaxxers who yearn to attain airbrushed perfection. They worship male models like Jordan Barrett and Sean O’Pry, whose runway walks represent the pinnacle of guys overcoming the fallibility of the flesh. Clavicular’s phone lock screen is a picture of David Gandy, widely considered the highest-grossing male model in history. “I’m just here for the edits on TikTok,” he says.
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Looksmaxxing descends from 2000s pick-up artist forums and 2010s incel culture. In essence, it’s an ecosystem of influencers, forums, video editors, and clipfarmers. At the extreme end, adherents lengthen their legs by breaking their bones, undergo bimaxillary osteotomies (double jaw surgery), and imbibe peptides that pledge to augment your brainpower and suppress your appetite. In 2023, I wrote a story about my experience “softmaxxing,” the lite version of looksmaxxing, and was forced to label bonesmashing a “fake trend” because we couldn’t find evidence that people were actually hammering their faces to induce micro-tears in the bones, which would then purportedly regrow in a more defined and masculine way.
Years later, along came Clavicular, the bonesmasher who puts into practice techniques that seemed like internet rumors or figments of the looksmaxing community’s imagination. Once he found the scene’s premier website Looksmax.org, he couldn’t get off it. He posted so frequently that he became one of the most popular members, and even a moderator (more like an immoderator). He’s spoken about becoming the “lab rat of the community,” the guy willing to risk everything to ascend (glow up). He’s used the risky anabolic steroid trenbolone, which is not approved for humans—just animals—and claims to have smoked meth to burn off flab (Did it feel good? “Of course, it’s fucking meth.”) His purported pill intake includes everything from beta blockers (for anxiety reduction) to minoxidil (hair growth) to melanotan II (sunless tanning) to retatrutide (appetite suppression). After just three weeks at Sacred Heart University, the school kicked him out when Looksmax users tipped them off about his habits and steroids were found in his room.
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At one point, he recommended his audience try to reduce anxiety with baclofen, a muscle relaxer. In December 2024, while driving home from his job at a restaurant in Massachusetts, he crashed his car. On the Looksmax forum, Clavicular wrote that it was because he’d fallen asleep off the baclofen. “No comment,” his publicist says when I bring this up. “Oh yeah. It’s silly,” Clavicular adds. “How about we comment on the car crash where the driver fucked up my Sprinter? Bro, this fucking retard drives it under a bridge that says seven foot clearance, and it’s a fucking Sprinter.”
Despite everything, Clavicular is still alive. More than that, he’s succeeded. He is conventionally attractive, with a prominent jawline and a symmetrical face, although it’s hard to say how much of that springs from the bonesmashing and testosterone and how much is just him growing up and slimming down.
Lately he seems to have broken containment, evolving rapidly from purely online looksmaxxing guy into something like a mainstream personality. The uninitiated seem to find him both amusing and terrifying. His first spotlight moment came in December, when he told the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles that even though his personal politics hewed closer to JD Vance’s, he would vote for Gavin Newsom in 2028, because Newsom is hotter and Vance is “obese.” He’s since been covered by outlets like The New York Times and The Atlantic as a New Type of Guy to whom concerned attention must be paid—a harbinger of a future generation of post-canceled nihilists who would vote for a liberal if he looks like Superman.
But to anyone in the know, Clavicular was pretty clearly just saying shit. He was put on the spot and came up with a provocative answer that slots into his impossible worldview—namely, that good looks are everything, to the point that they can determine the course of history. He isn’t going to vote for Newsom. He probably isn’t going to vote at all, because he thinks politics is a waste of time. Nonetheless, the far right has eagerly claimed him as their own. While he’s claimed looksmaxxing isn’t racist, his proclivity for slurs and casual misogyny, like saying women shouldn’t have the right to vote, makes it obvious why figures like Nick Fuentes have embraced him.
Normies have also become obsessed with the lingo of looksmaxxing, which has simmered in deep crevices of the web for years, incrementally adding freaky new terms and in-jokes. There is “mogging,” or outshining someone; “foid,” code for a woman; you can be christened a Becky (mid), a Stacy (hotter), a Chad (GOAT male status), or simply a jester (idiot).
Things have lately leveled up into the realm of pure parody. Clips alleging that Clavicular had been “frame mogged” by an “ASU FRAT LEADER” (the broad-shouldered fitness influencer Varis Gilaj) went viral. Joe Bernstein joked on X about “prosemaxxing” as he wrote his NYT profile of Clavicular. Andrew Tate, meanwhile, is clutching at relevancy by screaming about “MOGGING!” and urging Clavicular to start a brand called Mog. While most of this discourse is cringe and out of touch, the lexicon is so malleable, and the looksmaxxing characters so absurd, that it’s expanded into a funny cinematic universe. Looksmaxxing star Androgenic, the Clavicular of Australia, is being pitted against the “ASU FRAT LEADER” in flyers hyping up a fictional “WORLD WAR MOG.” Never-before-seen strings of words are being mashed together: “CATASTROPIC MOG ALLIANCE,” “INSTANT JESTERGOON,” “ADAMANTIUM FRAMECEL BERSERKER.”
Among looksmaxxers, Clavicular stands out because he’s relatively well-versed in the language of chemical antagonists and maxillary bones. He became infamous partly by critiquing “bad” looksmaxxing methods, and he’s gone viral with clips surgically deconstructing the deficiencies in peoples’ faces according to supposedly objective standards of beauty. While straight men tend to salivate at the sight of Sydney Sweeney, Clavicular called her “malformed.”
“Her upper maxilla is extremely recessed—she’s got the eyes of doom with no infraorbital support,” he deadpanned.
Clavicular has said that he’s never officially been diagnosed with autism, but he often refers to himself as an “autist” and talks about his antisocial youth. “I rot[ted] in my room… posting on Looksmax,” he said to an acquaintance at one point before the show. “I used to not really be social. All the IRL streaming is performative, I don’t even like going out to the club anymore.” When I asked him if he had any friends as a child, he got defensive. “I hope this is not a malicious line of questioning with, you know, trying to make it seem questionable, my growing up,” he said. “It’s just not that relevant to the story.” I told him I had read about his antisocial teenage years, and the times he would intentionally avoid talking to his family, sometimes waking up 30 minutes early before school just to avoid them. “In high school, yeah,” he continued. “We can start there.”
The existence of his framemogger-in-crime Drago at least answers the question of whether he has any friends right now. While Clavicular’s getting photos taken at the show, Drago tells me how they met—two years ago, through Looksmax.org. They were among the few forum regulars brave enough to post their actual faces, and they bonded over being doxxed. The two hung out near-daily on Discord. “All of our talking,” Drago says, “would legitimately be about looksmaxxing and what we’d be doing to ascend.” Now, as a member of the team, he helps Clavicular maintain a near-constant stream schedule that’s only interrupted in the morning for breakfast: "He just does butter bagel, no cream cheese. Do not hand him a fucking burger with cheese on it—he will fucking throw that shit at you.”
To be “ascended” means you must have once been “descended,” and the Joker arc of a lot of the looksmaxxing legends begins with feeling lonely and insecure as teens. Zyzz, the OG internet looksmaxxer, began as the skinniest kid in his school and felt “like a bitch” walking next to girls. Kareem Shami, a friend of Clavicular’s who got big with looksmaxxing videos on TikTok, told me a couple of years ago that he got into the scene after being bullied in high school for his acne and his size. For these men, looksmaxxing offers the dream of control, a promise that the world and women will bend around you if only you make your jawline sharp enough. While some of it is a delusion, looksmaxxing has become so popular because it articulates a very basic, statistically proven truth: Hot people have easier lives. But once you get hot, does the gnawing feeling of inner emptiness ever really go away?
Clavicular is the last to come strutting down the runway, which isn’t actually a runway, but a kind of labyrinth in between rows of chairs occupied by an unlikely cast of semi-notables and strange misfits, from the hosts of the podcast Red Scare to YouTuber Tana Mongeau to artists like Flo Milli. After I explain Clavicular’s story to a prominent magazine publisher who’s seated next to me, he stares ahead blankly and says, “Will he still be here at 27?” Down the row are Anna Delvey, ankle monitor exposed, and the disgraced politician George Santos, who compliments me on my blue hair and says he’s trying to get Clavicular to come on his podcast and get a pedicure with him.
Clavicular walks out to the metallic shrapnel of trans pioneer Sophie’s “Faceshopping,” a deeply ambivalent exploration of the pressures of digital artifice and self-commodification. He’s followed closely by his cameraman, Brock, wearing a snapback and sweats and broadcasting everything to Kick. “What a queer,” someone writes in the chat.
Soon the show’s over and it’s time to kick back. We load into Clavicular’s Sprinter van and head to Le Bain for an afterparty sponsored by Remilia Corporation, a crypto company whose founder spends a lot of time online complaining about how Remilia deserves to be considered one of the great art movements of the 2020s. Sometime during the ride, Clavicular logs on to his Looksmax account and gloats in a thread: “First .org user to get into a fashion show.”
He arrives thirsty for some high-level hotties, but the scene inside is tragic. A quiet woman who goes to Parsons hands out flimsy Remilia hats and an older gentleman tries to coax Clavicular into promoting one of Remilia’s signature plushie toy dolls on the livestream. “We’re here for some bitches, but it doesn’t look like there’s many bitches,” Clavicular says plaintively. “I think we should bounce, bro.” Immediately after that, the choice is made even clearer when a woman who identifies herself as the manager of Le Bain comes up to him and demands he turn off the stream, then says that nobody knows who he is.
While Clavicular hits McDonald’s, I stick around at Le Bain to get some crowd analysis. “I really do think Clavicular is an artist in the very pure sense—whether he’s fully aware of everything, it’s hard to say,” says the writer coldhealing. “But I think many of these people are meant to be reinterpolated: he creates something and people are meant to quote-tweet it.”
“I mogged him with my boobs tonight,” offers Lia Palmer, a model from the show.
“Clavicular has been so successful because he is honest about what he wants at a time when AI seems to be threatening the American way of life,” adds Miles Shore, another model from the show, who’s known online as Pariah the Doll. “People have been saying we live in a culture of narcissism since the 1970s. Now it’s becoming 1,000 times more extreme than anyone ever imagined… It’s so interesting because, like, why? I think it’s because the only chance at upward mobility, as a normal white guy in America, is to be extremely beautiful and an online troll.”
The night’s torrent of unexpected crossovers would soon spawn more clips than I could count. Clavicular’s far-right friend Nick Fuentes was elated after Clavicular ditched the party, going off on a rant about how his hardcore fanbase, the Groypers, had clinched a crucial victory against Remilia, who he views as LARPing “rizzless chuds” linked to Peter Thiel’s techno-surveilling, Israel-backing faction of the right. “This is a little reminder to Dimes Square… You will never have the same level of cultural relevance and authenticity and aura as the Groypers,” Fuentes gloated. But from what I could tell, Clavicular doesn’t care about any of this shit: “Listen, all I know is it was a fucking lame party. There was like no girls, it was just old people,” he sighed to me.
I’m about to head home when I check Clavicular’s livestream and see he’s in FiDi at the club Skino, for another NYFW afterparty hosted by Los Angeles Apparel and the “digital museum” welcome.jpeg. He’s somehow embedded himself in a very different yet equally eclectic art milieu. Inside a building that contains the music interviewer Emwell, comedian/trickster William Banks, and the sibling electronic duo The Frost Children, there is Clavicular, McDonald’s dopamine coursing through his brain. He’s eagerly searching for girls to rizz up for content, but things sour quickly. A woman begins following him, yelling that he’s a Nazi and a racist and urging him to call her, a Black woman, the N-word. He turns and says, “Shut the fuck up, bitch.” Soon, everything erupts into bedlam.
My car pulls up just as Clavicular’s Sprinter van pulls away, and I catch a panting Atticus Torre outside. The designer tells me that a brawl began inside Skino when Torre’s friend Jack and Clavicular’s friend Drago started shoving each other, which spiraled into a full-blown fight. In a video posted by William Banks, captioned “Clavicular ATTACKED at NYC club,” Clavicular and Torre can be seen grappling while Joe tries to restrain Torre from behind and loud dance music bangs away. A security guard grabs Clavicular from behind and lifts him up and away from the fray—and then, as the song reaches a crescendo, Banks flips the camera to his own grinning face as he pogos and fist-pumps, just another New Yorker caught up in Clavicular’s vortex.
“As pissed off as I am right now, I feel so happy knowing that that happened,” Torre says of the altercation. “If I had just stood there the rest of this night… and had this hatred in my heart for him and not done anything about it, I would’ve felt like the biggest pussy in the world.”
The field trip leader for Clavicular’s Manhattan debut is his new publicist. Mitchell Jackson represents a scatter-spray of the condemned and the kooky, from Candace Owens to No Jumper host Adam22. Elena Velez booked Clavicular for the show through Jackson’s company, and Jackson is likely the reason why the popular conservative commentator Brett Cooper, also a client of his, attended the event. Throughout the time we’re together, Jackson behaved less like a publicist than a handler for an unaccompanied minor. He even referred to Clavicular as his “son” at one point. When a couple of people with a camera snuck into the fashion show to gather footage for a Hulu doc about Clavicular, Jackson barked to have them ejected (“If it was Netflix, that’d be one thing,” Clavicular reasons. “No one gives a fuck about Hulu”). During my sit-down interview with Clavicular in the Sprinter, Jackson kept trying to look over my shoulder at the questions on my laptop.
Jackson told me I couldn’t conduct my interview offstream. But he manages to get Clavicular to not record while taping an episode of his client Adam Friedland’s YouTube talk show the day after Clavicular’s runway debut. Before the show, Friedland and I compare notes. “It’s sad, right?” he says. I mention Clavicular’s knowledge of peptides and Friedland jokes that he’s like a drug addict who read a lot on Erowid. Soon Clavicular arrives, after a morning of bagels with his parents in New Jersey. He later says that he barely slept last night: “I was just watching my edits on TikTok.”
In his interview with Friedland, Clavicular seems uncomfortable at first, shifting in his seat, biting his lip and puffing up his nostrils when Friedland says something cringe; he doesn’t seem to be able to read his interlocutor’s wry cues. But he slowly warms up. He reveals that he has never heard of Nirvana, or of Zohran Mamdani: “I’m so far removed, I couldn’t give a fuck, man.” He talks about how his need to produce content has meant livestreaming while having sex (only sound, no visuals) and intentionally making himself ejaculate in one minute so he can get back to being productive.
After the recording, we hop in the Sprinter and hit Raising Cane’s in Astor Place, where a gaggle of teens scrambles for photos while shouting his name. Back in the van, Clavicular tells me that he “would never live here in my entire life. I’d rather do anything but live here.” He fields some business calls, one about a casino sponsorship and another one from someone who might pay him $200,000 to wear a cortisol bracelet during a future subathon. Clavicular and Jackson confer about the press that last night’s chaos stirred up. “Page Six wrote some bitchy thing about what happened at the club,” Jackson says, “but all I care about is that you’re in Page Six.”
“Someone wrote a piece saying I was too stupid to understand what was going on last night,” says Clavicular.
“Oh it was Garbage Day, it was Ryan Broderick. He doesn’t matter,” Jackson replies.
“I think that’s good, though,” Clav goes. “It’s funny.”
I lob a handful of questions at Clavicular. His answers are clipped but not intentionally cold; he seems to need certain types of questions to pry him open. He tells me that it was nice seeing his parents this week, that it was the first time he’s been home in ages. They’re an unseen presence in Clavicular’s streams, appearing sporadically in the form of texts and phone calls to chastise him for doing drugs or looking the fool. While they attempted to take away his testosterone and hammers as a teen, they’ve adjusted to his lifestyle now, he says. “They’re happy for the most part and they get it, but they still get pissed, like, when I get sent to jail or if there’s headlines… I was calling my dad at 3:00 a.m. or whatever from jail. No parent’s gonna be happy to hear that.”
This week, a little discourse bomb exploded among esoteric new-gen conservatives, who are arguing over whether Clavicular, Velez, or the Remilia Corp. have received funding from Peter Thiel, the right-wing billionaire with ties to the downtown New York scene. I ask Clavicular if he is funded by Thiel. “No,” he states. “[Internet users] were saying that because I got my charges dropped. They were like, There’s no way. There has to be some shadow organization funding [him].” The boring truth is that he’s funded not by Thiel or the Illuminati but, in a roundabout way, by gamblers—he’s said he gets $133,000 a month from Kick, which is backed by the online casino Stake.
I ask for his favorite album ever. “That’s a good question, man,” he says. “I just like individual songs, I think that albums are a shit concept, ’cause now I have to like every song on the album. It’s retarded.”
I ask him for his mile time. “Running is so ridiculous to me, because I can never think of a scenario where I would be required to run. That doesn’t seem like something we’ve had to do since prehistoric times. Running? Ridiculous, you can’t even fathom that.”
What if somebody chased you with a gun?
“A gun shoots projectiles. You’re not outrunning a bullet.”
What about a knife, then?
“Huh?”
A knife?
“Well, yeah, but I don’t know. I wouldn’t bring a knife to a gunfight.”
He explains the economy of Kick “clippers,” the anonymous users who spam bite-sized Clav clips on multiple platforms. Kick supposedly pays people to clip streamers’ content; Clavicular told me his clippers get $30 for every 1,000 views they rack up. His whopping 950 clippers, the most of any streamer, function as both workers who boost his content and parasites who flip his humiliations into personal profit. The clip madness has gotten to the point where whenever Clavicular opens his timeline, all he sees is a mirror of the life he has just lived, a never-ending reel of peak Clav clips playing on loop. He likes that, because “I get to see how shots went, and I’ll look through the comments and see reactions. It helps me get some feedback on my content.”
I contemplate breaking the fourth wall and commandeering the stream with a stump speech on the indignities of this lifestyle, its bleak mew-athon race to the bottom, but realize it would probably just make the viewers in the chat spam “JEW REPORTER” and “BLUE HAIR QUEER” even more than they already are. Instead I tell Clavicular to listen to xaviersobased’s “Negative Canthal Tilt” and urge him to read Marcel Proust, maybe in the hopes that it will nourish his soul.
“Proust wrote a book about a really good-looking guy that was just about… It was kind of like your streams, in the sense where the book is just his day-to-day life,” Jackson translates.
“Okay. Yeah absolutely. Sounds good,” Clavicular responds, then turns to his phone and says, to the chat, “This is like a bookmaxxing jester.”
It is cold and dark in Washington Square Park. Clavicular stumbles over to an older fellow earnestly offering philosophy advice, and someone who identifies as a witch, both of whom he ridicules. Within minutes, the park devolves into a war zone. There’s the cluster of 20 white boys from NYU swarming him for a photo on one side, along with randoms jostling to get on the stream and heckle him with Ha ha, you’re being framemogged! jokes. On the other side of the fountain, a group of artsy-looking people who aren’t white tell him to kill himself and fuck off.
In his mission to transcend jesterhood, Clavicular has made himself into the ultimate fool, a toy for the world to play with. But the last laugh always goes to the jester, even if he’s laughing to himself in the algorithmic insane asylum. The runway debut, the afterparties, the fight, the scorn and the selfies: He seemed very pleased with how this trip went, the clip firestorm it generated. The way Clavicular’s celebrity works, everything helps his unkillable viral machine. The only way for him to lose is if he loses the world’s attention. This GQ piece is just another notch on the bedpost.
