F or more than 20 years Mark Zuckerberg has made a Macbook grey T-shirt and equally drab-coloured hoodie his trademark. But now the Facebook founder has ditched his signature look in favour of something with a bit more oomph.
His new wardrobe features jazzy embroidered floral shirts, boxy black T-shirts emblazoned with Latin phrases, chain necklaces and a shearling coat that would not look out of place on the set of the western drama Yellowstone. He has even grown out his tightly cropped Caesar cut for looser curls.
This week he cemented his transformation, sharing a series of photos from a 1970s-themed party on Instagram wearing a black silk shirt unbuttoned to his navel and a glittery embellished jacket.
“The timeline changed when zuck stopped wearing that grey T-shirt every day,” read one comment underneath the post. “Zucks glow up needs to be studied in universities,” stated another. Some are even calling it “the Zuckanissance”.
Ash Jones, the founder of Great Influence, a personal branding agency that works with entrepreneurs and CEOs, describes it as a “tactical shift”. When Zuckerberg was called in front of the US Senate in 2018 after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, online chatter centred on how Zuckerberg in his “sorry suit” appeared to be almost robotic in his behaviour. “People were referring to him as an alien,” Jones says. “His advisers realised they had to shift that perception. They wanted to make him more approachable. They needed to humanise him.” In 2021 Facebook was rebranded as Meta. Now three years later, Zuckerberg 2.0 has hatched.