How to dress down like a power player

[chahlley]

(Style & beauty Today Friday 28 July 2017)

How to dress down like a power player

Clockwise from top left: Amazon.com chief executive Jeff Bezos, Facebook chief operating officer

Sheryl Sandberg, Twitter executive chairman Omid Kordestani and GoPro chief executive

Nick Woodman pictured  in relaxed attire at the Allen & Company annual media conference

in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 12-14. Photos: AFP

Even clad in casual threads, the world’s business elite wear clothes that send a message

Published: 4:00 AM, July 28, 2017

NEW YORK — Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, wore skinny cargo pants and a cardigan the colour of dried mud. Ivanka Trump donned an untucked, oversized white shirt and skinny jeans.

The chief executive of Kering — the French luxury conglomerate that owns Gucci, Saint Laurent and Brioni — Francois-Henri Pinault, had a stretched-out zip-up hoodie on — so did Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga.

Ron Meyer, vice-chairman of NBCUniversal, was clad in a Mr Rogers black cardigan and baggy black shorts. Omid Kordestani, executive chairman of Twitter, wore a Patagonia puffer.

These were some of the outfits modelled at that ultimate showcase of mogul leisurewear formally known as the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference 2017, and more colloquially called “summer camp for billionaires”. The annual event sees a gathering of tech, media and business moguls for a week-long conference in Idaho in July.

If you want to know how to dress down like a power player, there is no better case study, thanks to the distillation of entrepreneurs, executives and influencers at the event.

Officially, there is no dress code at the conference beyond “relaxed” — or “humble,” as a regular attendee once said. And while the “no press” policy means less imagery emerges from the event than from, say, red-carpet happenings, enough snaps of schmoozing lords of the universe exiting their cars on arrival or taking the air between meeting sessions get released to provide fairly good intel on how they define off-duty dress. This can best be characterised as “calculated schlubbiness” or “Who can give the impression that they care less about what they wear than the next guy?”

Apparently, when you have reached the top of the mountain, literally and professionally, it is really about the smarts, not the suits — at least as far as the male attendees go.

The women, fewer and farther between, seem less inclined to pretend that they have not thought at all about what they pack. See, for example, Diane von Furstenberg in a perfectly twisted scarf and suede jacket one day, a coordinated navy number and matching trousers the next; and Mary Barra, the General Motors chief executive, in a cropped black leather motorcycle jacket over a white T-shirt.

Trump — implicitly promoting her own brand-by-association — wore a pair of Ivanka Trump Evia block-heel mules. But it is the men, in their “what, this old thing?” rejection of the tailored sartorial culture in which most of them spend their days (the tech crowd excepted), whose attire is the most instructive.

The predominant ethos being either the gym clothes shoved in the bottom drawer or back of the closet and then pulled out to meet with the personal trainer in the private gym look, or the “polo and baggy jeans on the back deck where no one can see you” style.

Indeed, the only branded area on the body was really the foot, where Nikes were impossible to obscure, and the bridge of the nose, where the Persols, mirrored aviators and Oliver Peoples rest.

All of which made the few attendees wearing the traditional casual Friday uniform of jacket and shirt seem uptight and prissy in comparison to their peers.

Even Jared Kushner, of navy-blazer-and-flak-jacket-combo-in-Iraq fame, seemed to have learned one thing from his experience and swopped the blazer for a beige crew neck and jeans. Still, he blended into the crowd better when simply wearing a dark long-sleeve athletic shirt, having traded buttoned-up for loosened-up.

But that was nothing compared with the extreme relaxers, most notably the tech crowd, for whom dressing down is a natural form of camouflage.

The best examples were perhaps Nick Woodman from GoPro in a faded black T-shirt with a playing-card bunny on the front, or Jeff Bezos in a polo, sleeves straining around his biceps.

Indeed, aside from navy, there was, it is worth pointing out, a lot of black on display, including on Harvey Weinstein, Daniel Ek of Spotify and Barra — possibly as much as there is during Fashion Week. Which is interesting.

You can understand it. After all, this is not really “off-duty” at all; it is faux off-duty. Family may come along for the fun, but attendees are still dressing for one another. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous. And that means that to a certain extent, what they wear is being chosen to send a message, and define an attitude.

That being: Who can seem secure enough in their position to look fully unguarded? To not need any of the armour of power — aides, clothes, lawyers or polished shoes? To expose their soft underbelly (or loose underbelly, as the case may be), the better to appear open with their peers?

Of course, if the rest of us adopted the same strategy, we might just look sloppy. A better takeaway is simple: Truth is, when it comes to casual clothing, we are all as subject to the effects of peer pressure and herd instinct as we are when it comes to professional clothing. It is just at the opposite extreme. THE NEW YORK TIMES