In a midseries episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David, the HBO show’s star and creator, greets his No. 1 frenemy, Susie, (Susie Essman), who has turned up at a fancy gathering wearing a top hat and a morning coat.
He gives her a once-over, then announces, with all the finesse of a carnival barker, “Ladies and gentlemen, the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.”
Susie shoots him a stink eye. “Like you know anything about fashion,” she sneers.
But Mr. David, 76, might beg to differ. On “Curb,” which ends its 12th and final season on Sunday, he spews barbs like pepper spray, weighing in caustically on a welter of issues: Who gets to consume the larger share of a dessert, to cut in line, to sit at the cool kids’ table?
But his most impassioned critiques have largely centered on fashion and on tartly deconstructing what his friends and other people are wearing.
Throughout his career Mr. David, a Mr. Blackwell of television comedy, has trained a gimlet eye on human foibles. As a creator, executive producer and head writer for seven seasons of “Seinfeld,” he also lent that show his shrewd observational powers. Even those who have not watched (or rewatched) “Seinfeld” may have heard of the puffy shirt, the braless wonder or the fictionalized J. Peterman catalog company, which was inspired by a real business of the same name.
Then, as now, Mr. David operates on the premise that few things are funnier or more revealing than the coded messages we send when we dress.
Fashion is an instrument in his arsenal, not only as a means of self expression but as a reliable measure of how we think about ourselves, who we are and who we want to be.
Mr. David has, unsurprisingly, applied his analytical prowess to his own wardrobe. A perpetual outsider, the Jewish boy from Brooklyn, he is no less eager than the characters he targets to mediate the world around him through the nuances of dress.
His signature style — an obsessively considered amalgam of long-sleeve polo shirts, tan trousers, nondescript hoodies, blazers and sneakers — seems meant to telegraph the status and breezy self-assurance of a Hollywood bigwig. So do the baseball caps he often wears onscreen and off, which have featured logos for the luxury island resort Amanyara and for Air Mail, a digital newsletter catering to an affluent crowd.
Mr. David makes no secret that his one-look-fits-all approach is meant in part to paste over his own class anxieties and to simultaneously prop up a shaky self-image. And he is determined to fit in whatever the circumstance: In an early episode of “Curb,” he asks Cheryl (Cheryl Hines), his onscreen wife for part of the series, what the average gentile wears to a baptism.
Sartorially, he has adopted a distinctive credo: Wear one nice item at a time, “otherwise it’s too much,” he once told GQ. “You have to be half-dressed. That’s my fashion theory: Half is more.” (A representative for Mr. David did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)
Excess is repugnant to Mr. David, and calling it out has been a through line in his work. His proliferating list of aversions in “Curb” include floppy shorts and tucked-in shirts on men, extra-long shoelaces (he repeatedly trips over his own), bow ties, bedazzled sweatshirts and affectation in any form.
In a later “Curb” episode, he confronts his friend Richard Lewis, the late comedian, at Mr. Lewis’s art exhibition. Taking in his friend’s silver-buttoned, mandarin collar tunic, Mr. David taunts, “Are you vying for the title of the most pretentious man in the world?”
In the Season 10 finale, he eyes the pocket square worn by a television correspondent who is about to interview him. “It looks out of place,” Mr. David chides. “That’s for some English dandy. It’s not for a journalist.”
Often, he invokes fashion during awkward or painful situations. In an early episode, when a grieving window shows him a treasured photo of her husband, Mr. David zeros in on the dead man’s attire. “I love this shirt,” he tells the widow. “Do you have any idea where he got it?” he asks, a query that attests less to his acquisitive nature than to his own unease.
On “Curb,” Mr. David reserves some of his sharpest zingers for people who are trying too hard. In a midseries episode, his housemate Leon (J.B. Smoove), doing his best impersonation of an accountant, wears a suit with a bow tie and spectacles. “What’s with this suit?” Mr. David asks. “You look like Farrakhan.”
He is no less affronted when people’s garb seems inconsistent with their professional standing. After seeing his psychiatrist prancing on a beach in a skimpy Speedo in an early episode, he starts to question the doctor’s bona fides. He similarly bristles when his estate lawyer turns up for a meeting in jeans and tells Mr. David that it’s casual Friday. “I want you people to be uncomfortable all the time,” Mr. David responds.
And when a real estate agent who is showing a house insists to Mr. David and Mr. Lewis that his sweater is 100 percent cashmere, Mr. David squinches up his features in disbelief.
“Maybe 35 to 50 at the most,” he counters, before saying to Mr. Lewis, “This guy’s lying about a cashmere sweater. Do you feel comfortable with that?”
On occasion, Mr. David’s critiques can be constructive — if flagrantly sexist.
In a midseason episode, he suggests to his office assistant, who is wearing a skimpy T-shirt that exposes her midriff, that “if it’s not too much trouble,” she may start wearing more work-appropriate attire. When she asks what precisely that would entail, he instructs her cheerily. “Something between a this,” he says, gesturing at her shrunken top, “and a burqa.”
In another episode, Mr. David casts a cool eye on Paula, an escort who is turned out in the standard trappings of her trade: a bustier, a tiny skirt and fishnet hose. “Why this outfit?” he asks benignly, going on to suggest that her business could pick up if she wore something more discreet.
She takes him up on his suggestion, trading her spandex for cashmere, and, wouldn’t you know, business prospers. Mr. David, who knows perfectly well what his status-conscious peers would expect from a hooker, couldn’t be happier, announcing beatifically that he has performed a mitzvah.
Yet again, his critique proves spot on.
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