Sam Bankman-Fried and Schlubby Style

We have, said Joseph Rosenfeld, an image consultant and stylist in Silicon Valley, swallowed the costume theory hook, like and sinker. “When ‘tech bros’ like SBF are mid-meteoric rise in notoriety and wealth-building, the public is willing to give them a pass because the look is de rigueur,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. That costume has been reinforced by Hollywood, and the sheer fact that every time “a V.C. forks over a massive investment to a schlubbily dressed person (almost 100 percent of the time male-presenting), that’s a passive form of approval.”

And a self-perpetuating one, at least if, as Mr. Galloway also said, you are white, male and young. “If a person of color or a woman or a 50-year-old showed up like that, security probably would not let them in the building,” he noted. In many ways, the dress code is yet another example of the double standard rife in Silicon Valley (or those companies we associate with Silicon Valley, even if, like FTX, they had headquarters elsewhere) — the one that saw Sheryl Sandberg in her Facebook days wearing sleeveless power sheaths in a room of hoodies.

Or at least it was. Suddenly, however, Mr. Bankman-Fried has cast the whole look in a different light. His sloppy dress seems less a reflection of a higher calling or of a decision to devote his own finances to “effective altruism,” than a red flag about a sloppy approach to other people’s money. A clue that someone who doesn’t care about showering or style is maybe someone who doesn’t care about audits and the co-mingling of funds.

That, in fact, in Mr. Bankman-Fried’s overwhelming embrace of the dress-down mystique — one colleague, Andy Croghan, told The New York Times, “Sam and I would intentionally not wear pants to meetings” — he actually missed the point, which was that it is the details and what you don’t see that matters. Mr. Jobs’s black turtlenecks were by the Japanese designer Issey Miyake, for example; Mr. Zuckerberg’s gray T-shirts come from the Italian designer Brunello Cucinelli. They only seemed unstudied.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/style/sam-bankman-fried-style.html