The tech guy uniform is full of basic T-shirts and bad haircuts, so I get why Alexandr Wang’s look at Meta Connect is riling Silicon Valley. If you’re used to the black turtlenecks of Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Holmes, or the white T-shirts of Mark Zuckerberg, sure, Wang’s camo-print deer T-shirt and matching Crocs seem like a fashion statement.
They are not. They are merely how 20-something coastal elites dress these days.
I could throw a stone in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and hit seven of these types in one go. Last year, I dated an early-stage founder who insisted on exclusively thrifting his clothes, just as Wang has insisted that his deer-print shirt cost no more than $30 from a Santa Cruz shop. (Thirty bucks for a used T-shirt? The secondhand market has gotten out of control.) For them, wearing only thrift store digs is another badge of honor: Look how hard they’re locking in, they won’t even spend money on new clothes. Add to that Gen Z’s general love of secondhand shopping. Oh, you got that from Shein? Do you want the planet to combust?
Despite all the internet sleuthing about how Wang’s T-shirt is probably $800 from a designer label, I fully believe that he did, in fact, source it from an overpriced thrift store in Northern California. I’ve spent a significant amount of time in Lake Tahoe, the place whose name adorns the sleeve of his graphic tee. I can confirm the design is exactly the type you’d expect from a place where local bumper stickers read, “Go back to the Bay.” Crocs have been hot with Gen Z since at least the pandemic — Piper Sandler found they were the No. 6 favorite footwear brand among teens in 2023, and this year, the brand said it had its first billion-dollar quarter in revenue.
Make no mistake: This is a deeply Gen Z-coded outfit. “What’s happening with that outfit, whether he means to or not, is he’s emphasizing his age,” said Daniel James Cole, a fashion historian and professor at New York University.
Cole said he’s seen students around the campus where he teaches throw on similar fits, matching their outfits to their Crocs to emphasize them. He’s not the only one. Sofia Jiang, who works in marketing at clothing rental company BNTO and is the founder of the workwear brand SofSet, said Wang’s outfit wouldn’t be out of place downtown, where the outfits are zanier.
“I would say this is like Lower East Side or Brooklyn, part of a more artistic crowd,” Jiang said. She added that she could easily imagine “a 14-year-old boy from LA” picking out the antler camo T-shirt from a thrift store.
Gen Z loves ugly and ironic fashion, and other generations love to clown us. Last month, The New York Times ran an op-ed titled, “Gen Z Dresses Like They’ve Never Worn Clothes Before,” arguing that we dress like a pastiche of other subcultures that don’t make any sense together. Wang, 29, is following that to T: redneck graphic tee, gorp core fleece joggers, crocs, a mullet straight out of the “Love Island: Australia” villa, and rimless glasses that Ben Franklin himself would’ve worn. Yes, it doesn’t make sense. It’s a total mismatch of eras and aesthetics. That’s the point.
The fact that Wang chose to wear this while presenting at Meta Connect isn’t that far off from Zuck’s once-radical insistence on wearing the white tee as his uniform. Though Zuck himself has experienced varying levels of drip throughout his style evolution, his dress code has always been casual. Ten years ago, writers waxed poetic on how Zuck helped kill the suit and ushered in the era of business casual. Wang just might be the next iteration of that.
Amina Salahou, the founder and creative director of global production network Les Adore, said Wang could be signaling that he’s cut from the same cloth of startup founders Meta probably wants on Muse — thrift-shop warriors with no bed frames and passions for agentic AI.
“He’s just trying to tell the developer community that, you know, he’s part of them, he’s not part of a bureaucratic system,” Salahou said.
Most Gen Zers don’t have the kind of power or visibility Wang has, which is why he can wear the Gen Z off-duty uniform to speak at a Big Tech developer conference. His fashion isn’t innovative; it’s just the first time you’ve seen it in this context.
Clown it all you want — it’s only going to get harder to avoid.
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