Okay Geek Farm
Steve Jobs book excerpt explains why he only wore black turtlenecks, Levi's, and New Balance sneakers
Ricardo Trejo
Anyone who is slightly familiar with Steve Jobs will always remember him for his iconic look; wearing the same black turtleneck and 501 Levi’s jeans. Well, in an excerpt taken from his upcoming biography we finally get the answer to why he never seemed to wear anything else.
In response to an article Gawker did a few months ago on Steve Jobs’ fashion sense, Walter Issacson — writer of the Steve Jobs biography due out Oct. 24th — sent this excerpt from the book, explaining the very reason for why Steve decided to go with the simple yet original look:
“On a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, Jobs asked Sony’s chairman Akio Morita why everyone in the company’s factories wore uniforms. He told Jobs that after the war, no one had any clothes, and companies like Sony had to give their workers something to wear each day. Over the years, the uniforms developed their own signatures styles, especially at companies such as Sony, and it became a way of bonding workers to the company. “I decided that I wanted that type of bonding for Apple,” Jobs recalled.
Sony, with its appreciation for style, had gotten the famous designer Issey Miyake to create its uniform. It was a jacket made of rip-stop nylon with sleeves that could unzip to make it a vest. So Jobs called Issey Miyake and asked him to design a vest for Apple, Jobs recalled, “I came back with some samples and told everyone it would great if we would all wear these vests. Oh man, did I get booed off the stage. Everybody hated the idea.”
In the process, however, he became friends with Miyake and would visit him regularly. He also came to like the idea of having a uniform for himself, both because of its daily convenience (the rationale he claimed) and its ability to convey a signature style. “So I asked Issey to make me some of his black turtlenecks that I liked, and he made me like a hundred of them.” Jobs noticed my surprise when he told this story, so he showed them stacked up in the closet. “That’s what I wear,” he said. “I have enough to last for the rest of my life.”
This does explain a lot, something that you think would’ve widely become fact by now — that Steve was looking for a casual dress code at Apple, even if it was one that would make them all look opposite to his ideal of running an anti-corporate entity.
