Hey Silicon Valley, Maybe It’s Time to Dress Up, Not Down

The mythic figure that is the billionaire tech genius in the nowhere man tee may finally be about to meet its long overdue end. The arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency trading platform, on Monday in the Bahamas on charges of fraud, may signal not just the next stage in his downfall, but also a change in the global image-making of Silicon Valley.

After all, no one took the idea that a life of the boundless mind was reflected in a life freed from petty concerns like clothing further than Mr. Bankman-Fried (or SBF, as he is often called). Not for him the physical cage of a suit and tie. Instead, the T-shirt, cargo shorts and sneakers, often worn with white running socks scrunched down at the ankle.

And not just any T-shirt and cargo shorts, but what could seem like the baggiest, most stretched out, most slept in, most consciously unflattering T-shirts and shorts; the most unkempt bed-head. While the look may have evolved naturally, it became a signature as he rose to prominence, a look he realized was as effective at pushing the Pavlovian buttons of the watching public (and the investing community) as the Savile Row suits and Charvet ties of Wall Street.

“It’s as conscious as incorporating in the Bahamas where there is no to little regulatory oversight,” said Scott Galloway, an investor, podcasting host and professor of marketing, referring to the fact that FTX’s headquarters were in the Caribbean rather than California. “It’s the ultimate billionaire white boy tech flex: I’m so above convention. I’m so special I am not subject to the same rules and propriety as everyone else.”

It’s an image that has its roots not so much in Mr. Bankman-Fried’s youth in a family that embraced utilitarianism as in Albert Einstein’s unbrushed halo of hair, which became as much a symbol of the physicist’s genius as E = mc2. In Steve Jobs’s jeans and black turtleneck, and in Steve Wozniak’s kitschy shirts, long, stringy hair and beard (which took three hours to recreate for the “Jobs” biopic). In, of course, Mark Zuckerberg’s Adidas flip-flops, hoodies and gray T-shirts, which gave rise to the current tech uniform of choice.

It’s a uniform that telegraphs to the watching world somebody who doesn’t have the time to worry about what they are wearing because they are thinking such big, world-changing thoughts. Thoughts that no one else can possibly understand because they are so out there and potentially revolutionary. It plays on our general insecurity around science and the tech world; the whole idea of a language, made in code, impenetrable, that magically shrinks down all sorts of possibilities and puts them in the palm of your hand.