In his first ever public Q. & A. session, in November, 2014, Mark
Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer of Facebook, told viewers that,
although he found Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of him in “The Social
Network” “hurtful,” he had to admit that Aaron Sorkin had nailed his
wardrobe. In the film, Eisenberg’s shifty-eyed Mark Zuckerberg shuffles
around Harvard’s campus in flip-flops, hoodies, and wrinkled T-shirts.
The casual wardrobe suggested an arrogance, a glitch in the
nineteen-year-old’s moral compass. On that day in 2014, Zuckerberg was
wearing his updated uniform—a nearly tight heather-gray T-shirt and
sensible jeans—as he strode pleasantly around a handsome hall in the
company’s headquarters, answering questions about his clothes. Does he
really wear that same outfit every day? Yes, he said, because “I really
want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions
as possible about anything except how to best serve this community.”

The monotony of Zuckerberg’s wardrobe has become part of the myth of a
man whose
personality takes up worryingly little space in our cultural imaginations. (His only
other well-known trait is his red-green color blindness, which is said
to be the reason that Facebook is designed in shades of blue—a story
that, whether true or not, is a fitting metaphor for a society designed
to accommodate the men who control it.) It has become a trope of Silicon
Valley: the moneyed figure who dismisses fashion, and most other human
interests, as inefficient, even as he wears the commoner’s clothes in
order to seem humble, “transparent,” and morally steady. Like a cartoon
character who plucks from his wardrobe, for all eternity, the same
outfit, Zuckerberg’s style is the product of careful branding.

Which is to say that Zuckerberg cares deeply about how he looks. On Tuesday,
as the five-foot-seven Zuckerberg testified to Congress about data
privacy and security, he sat on what appeared to be a “three-inch
cushion,”
presumably so as not to appear small or timid before the procession of
lawmakers. He wore a navy suit—or, rather (and especially compared to the
congenital formal-wear experts in the room), the suit wore him. The tie,
Facebook blue, was visibly less than taut, as if knotted nervously, and
the jacket was just the tiniest bit large around the shoulders. All this
seemed to convey something about Zuckerberg’s forced acquiescence as he
cowered before his “Mr. Mark Zuckerberg” nameplate, trying to convince
the world that Facebook does not sell our personal data. It is a big
deal, the rare occasion when he wears a suit: to meet President Obama
and other heads of state; to get married, to Priscilla Chan; or “when $2
billion is at stake,” as
MarketWatch wrote, referring to his testimony defending Oculus, a Facebook-owned
company. The thing about formal wear is that it requires an ease to pull
it off—and Zuckerberg, who wasn’t so much answering questions as
tiptoeing around them, was not at all at ease.