Emperor's new clothes Zuckerberg leads way with a tech bro glow up

For more than 20 years, Mark Zuckerberg made a Macbook-grey T-shirt and an equally drab-colored hoodie his trademark look. But now, the Facebook founder has ditched this combo in favor of something with a bit more oomph.

- Chloe Mac Donnell

Zuckerberg's new wardrobe features jazzy embroidered floral shirts, boxy black T-shirts emblazoned with Latin or Greek 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, Zuckerberg cemented his transformation by sharing on Instagram a series of photographs from a 1970s-themed party of him 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 everyday,” read one comment underneath the post. “Zucks glow-up needs to be studied in universities,” stated another. Some are even calling it the “Zuckanaissance”.

Ash Jones, the founder of Great Influence, a personal branding agency that works with entrepreneurs and chief executives, describes this wardrobe transformation as a “tactical shift”. When Zuckerberg was called in front of the US Senate in 2018 over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, online chatter centered around how, dressed in his “sorry suit”, he appeared to be almost robotic.