Mark Zuckerberg Tries His Hand at Fashion

The chief executive’s ongoing extreme fashion makeover Meta edition isn’t slowing anytime soon.

Mark Zuckerberg would like us all to know that learning is best achieved through suffering.

And how is he telling us this? Through a T-shirt, of course.

“I’ve kind of started working on this series of shirts with some of my favourite classical sayings on them,” Zuckerberg said in mid-September during a taping of the Acquired podcast at San Francisco’s Chase Centre.

He was wearing a boxy, black tee printed in plump white letters with the Greek phrase “pathei mathos”. Loose translation? “Learning through suffering.” It was, according to Zuckerberg, “a little family saying”.

Another historical pearl was imparted through the T-shirt he wore at a Meta keynote presentation weeks later. This time, Greek was swapped for Latin. Kinda. His tee (again boxy, again black) read “aut Zuck, aut nihil,” an English-ified contortion of the Latin “aut Caesar, aut nihil” or, roughly, “either a Caesar or nothing”.

It took more than a Zuck to create these wide-as-they-are-long tees. As he explained in the podcast, they were made in partnership with Mike Amiri, a Los Angeles-based fashion designer.

Yes, between running Meta, making AI-enhanced spectacles, raising three children and all that MMA training, the 40-year-old Facebook founder has found time to tack yet another title on to his CV: clothing designer.

(Before minting his own ancient-slogan shirts, Zuckerberg wore a tee splayed with the Latin “Carthago delenda est” (Carthage must be destroyed) to his 40th birthday in May. Similar shirts can be bought for US$20 ($32) on Amazon.

In recent months, Zuckerberg has swapped his wet-newspaper grey hoodies for US$250 Bode shirts with embroidered flowers. He’s grown out his hair, bulked up and piled on a gold chain. Now, like wannabe Virgil Ablohs before him, he’s making his own tees.

But what’s with all the Greek and Latin? Through a representative, Zuckerberg declined an interview request for this article. But Zuckerberg does appear to fit the bill of an Ovid-reading, Gladiator-streaming, millennial man preoccupied with Roman might.

He took Latin as far back as high school. He honeymooned in Rome and named one of his daughters August (get it? Like Augustus). He commissioned artist Daniel Arsham to make an imposing statue of his wife, Priscilla Chan, proclaiming on Instagram that he was “bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife”.

“If you step back and look at the reasons why people — especially young men — seem to quote the classics, it’s a desire for power,” said Marcus Folch, associate professor of classics at Columbia University. “It articulates a desire for power.”

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how Zuckerberg, guiding a millions-strong nation-state of app users, could fancy himself as a tech-age Tiberius. After all, he isn’t just quoting a Caesar in these shirts, he’s likening himself to him.

Zuckerberg may have entered the imperialist phase of his glow-up, but the meaning of the quotes might be getting lost between text and the T-shirt. John Noël Dillon, a senior lector in Yale University’s classics department, pointed out that “aut Caesar, aut nihil” is commonly ascribed to Italian cardinal Cesare Borgia, the inspiration for Niccolo Machiavelli’s book The Prince. In the end, enduring power eluded him and he was stabbed to death at 31.

According to scholars, “pathei mathos” is, at least, less directly egotistical. It’s a “very deep, kind of profound” quote stemming from Aeschylus’ mythological play Agamemnon, said Folch. That text isn’t exactly obscure — if you’ve taken a Greek literature course in college, you likely read it — but it flashes a richer historical expertise than wearing a tee splayed with “veni vedi vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”).

Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at University of Westminster, said they are.

“Where it differs from your standard $10 tee is in the materiality, cut, construction and silhouette, all of which are far more thoughtful and deliberate,” he said, describing how their drop shoulders, baggier fit and longer sleeves nudge the custom shirts into “statement-piece” territory.

For now, like an app in early development, the shirts aren’t available for public consumption, though Zuckerberg has hinted in Instagram comments that a “limited drop” might be incoming. No clues were shared on pricing, but similar Amiri tees sell for US$750. A princely sum, indeed.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Jacob Gallagher

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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