Like so many journalists, I spent a lot of time this week looking at photos of Jensen Huang in his leather jackets. Huang wasn’t like those other execs — he was rugged. Now that Huang has stepped down following the revelations of his extramarital affairs, including with a Chinese spy, those leather jackets start to seem like a tell that Huang had fashioned himself as too much of a renegade.
But Huang’s dedication to leather jackets also brought me back to a long-held theory: When someone becomes known for wearing one thing, they can never be stylish. Huang has an outfit, one he’s worn on the cover of Time, at Nvidia conferences, even at dinners where he appeared next to that Chinese spy. But he doesn’t have taste.
I get it. It can be a struggle getting dressed. Picking one thing and sticking to it helps streamline one’s mornings. This is the logic that Huang, and other Silicon Valley luminaries, trot out. It helps brand them as C-suite sharks, too focused on productivity to bother with something as trivial as picking out a shirt. In a CBS interview from September, Huang said that wearing the same thing every day allowed him to “go focus on something else — that’s one decision made.”
I’ve always resented this thinking. It treats clothes like a problem to solve, rather than an outlet of self-expression. It reflects an incuriosity. You’re accepting that you’re stuck, that you’re closed off to the world. That you could never look at a red jacket or a fuzzed-out pine green sweater in a store window and see a better, brighter version of yourself.
As a man who writes about fashion, it has always frustrated me that the men who most often get noticed for what they wear are those who adhere to this cartoon character-like consistency.
For a time, every profile of Mark Zuckerberg mentioned his drab-fab T-shirts. Steve Jobs became a turtleneck-wearing meme. It has only perpetuated this idea that for men, especially successful men, clothes are not something worth taking pleasure in.
There is, though, a distinction between the single-item outfit and the personal uniform. There are plenty of people with a uniform I admire: Fran Lebowitz in her cowboy boots, white button-down shirts and Anderson & Sheppard blazers. Bill Cunningham in his French work jackets and khakis.
These are outfits that are earned. A person compiled them over time, changing out the shoes, or swapping a blue jacket for a black one, until they arrived at the thing that just works. They know they look great in it. That’s a sign of maturity.
Other things worth knowing about:
At one time, nearly every department store had a petite department, but just about all are gone. What happened? — Jeri, Dix Hills, N.Y.
Much has been written about the messed up relationship in fashion between sizing and body shape: the fact that a size 6 in one label is a 2 in another, or a size 10 in one is a 6 in another ….Read more.
