Jeff Bezos is not the only controversial tech titan to have embraced the Met Gala. On Monday night, Mark Zuckerberg traded his T-shirt for a tux in the latest, and most telling, sign of the once style-challenged Meta head’s new interest in the fashion world. After all, it wasn’t just any old tux. It was a Prada tux. Consider it his Met-amorphosis.
Though Meta-owned Instagram, fashion’s favorite social media platform, has long been a presence at the gala (the company sponsored the event in 2021), and Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s chief executive, is a regular, this is the first time that Zuckerberg himself has made an appearance at fashion’s biggest night.
Even if he didn’t walk the museum steps — and wasn’t included on the tip sheet the Met sent to photographers and reporters listing who was expected at the gala.
Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, who wore a red Alaïa gown, skipped the photo ops on the museum steps entirely, perhaps out of a desire to avoid some of the protests and criticism that have dogged the honorary chairs Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos.
Monday was also the first day of a New Mexico trial centering on Meta’s child safety regulations (or lack of them), and getting gussied up and partying is not necessarily the best look for someone whose company is in court.
Zuckerberg and Chan did, however, materialize for the cocktail party and the dinner, where they were said to be seated at the table of Anna Wintour, the gala’s mastermind and power broker.
The nominal reason for Zuckerberg’s sudden embrace of style may be the success of the Meta Ray-Ban and Meta Oakley smart glasses and the realization that perhaps fashion understands what consumers want to put on their bodies better than tech does. To that end, making friends, breaking bread and otherwise supporting the causes of the fashion folk is good business.
Zuckerberg has been wading into the fashion waters for a while now. Once the poster child for Silicon Valley nerdiness in his signature gray T-shirt, jeans and Tevas, he began experimenting with his own personal style about two years ago. First he loosened up his wardrobe, adding sheepskin jackets, gold chains and labels like John Elliott, Bode and even Alexander McQueen to his rotation. He grew his hair and even designed his own oversize custom tees with the Los Angeles label Amiri featuring classical Greek and Latin sayings.
Then, in February, he and Chan attended the Prada show during Milan Fashion Week (a sign, perhaps, of the tux to come, not to mention the possibility of Meta Prada glasses). And they were the special guests at a cocktail party hosted by Wintour the night before the Prada show, where they schmoozed with the great and the good of Italian fashion, including the designer Donatella Versace, the Loro Piana chief executive Frederic Arnault and the Diesel chieftain Renzo Rosso.
Still, Zuckerberg will go only so far in the name of fashion. His Prada tuxedo was classic, down to the bow tie. Not for him anything that dipped too overtly, or embarrassingly, into the evening’s “fashion is art” dress code.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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