Personal Style Can’t Be Hacked

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:

Matteo Tamburini has stepped down as Tod’s creative director. The Italian label said it’s going to “focus on more decisively communicating the brand’s values,” which is perhaps code for “we’re probably done with runway shows for now.”
Laia Garcia-Furtado’s book on Prada (which we interviewed her about) is out now. Go buy it.
Sofia Coppola made “Marie Antoinette” tees. They’re already sold out.
On Wednesday, I popped in to Third of June, a boutique in the West Village. Victor Kan, who runs the shop, was wearing a nifty ribbed sweater with a hood that looked hand-stitched on. It was from the Japanese brand Horses, which Kan said he was going to start stocking in a few weeks. Horses also just had a pop-up at Ven. Space. One to watch.
I also went to White Columns gallery to see Marc Hundley’s exhibition of shirts he’d stenciled with names and lyrics from artists like The Clash, Brian Eno, Lou Reed and Robyn. I loved his Smiths shirt with “Hang the DJ” in triplicate down the front. Making your own band shirt is just so much more gratifying than paying $300 for some vintage one. The whole exhibit was a great example of how the T-shirt is the canvas of our times.
JFK Jr.’s 1994 Saab sold for over $40,000. It would’ve made a great The Fashions-mobile.
While being guided through Loro Piana’s self-staged exhibit about cashmere, I paused to photograph a mannequin assembled with four different sweaters looped over its shoulder — in red, pink, gray and yellow. That night, I opened Instagram and saw a shoot for Alex Mill’s collaboration with J. Press that showed two models, each with two sweaters tied over their shoulders. His yellow and red; hers navy and cornflower blue. It’s not really something to try, but something to notice: Color. People crave it right now.
After an eight-month hiatus to restructure her business and address shipping delays, the designer Anifa Mvuemba has restarted her label, Hanifa.

What we’re reading and watching:

A very different sort of leather-heavy saga.
If you have the appetite to read more about the Rachel Cusk novel that excludes the names of the people, places and things she is obviously referring to (like Natalie Portman): “I sometimes think Cusk leaves out proper nouns for the same reason fashion designers eschew buttons on bias-cut silk: too many capital letters would ruffle the purity of the line.”
Guy Trebay’s look back on threeASFOUR, the fashion collective whose conceptual designs — like its signature Circle handbag — helped define downtown New York in the aughts.

Ask Vanessa

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.