When I meet Mark Zuckerberg, currently one of the poster boys for evil tech billionaires, a man whose products are used by about 46% of all living people in the world and whose company has a market cap of more than US$1trillion (approximately RM4.1trillion), he is wearing sky-blue, cable-knit shorts that look an awful lot like bloomers.
That was just over a month before what is turning out to be a style-centric period for Meta.
It started last month at Connect, the company’s annual new products reveal, where Zuckerberg took to the stage wearing a T-shirt with the words “Building is my love language”.
He waxed enthusiastic about the future, including the many new styles of smart glasses, and the company’s personal AI assistant, Muse, which looks a lot like a customisable stuffed animal in a onesie.
This was just after Vogue World kicked off Milan Fashion Week with Meta glasses as a sponsor, and around the same time W magazine produced an entire stand-alone advertorial zine devoted to a new glasses collaboration with K-pop star Lisa.
Before all of that, I had come to the compound in Lake Tahoe to try to understand the role style has come to play in the Zuckerberg saga, including the very public rebrand of 2024, when he went from robotic coder in a grey hoodie to fashion-conscious bro next door.
That the latest version of Zuckerberg coincides with Meta’s push into wearables, as well as with Silicon Valley’s obsession with the idea of taste and how important a role it will play in the future, may explain why he was finally willing to talk about it.
“I want to make sure that we really immerse ourselves in what people care about,” Zuckerberg said.
It turned out he had started with himself, his own preferences, and where they took him.
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Zuckerberg knows that what he does reflects on Meta.
“I care about that,” he said. “I think the company is an instantiation of my values.”
And, he said, he wants to “be intentional about how I program that”.
Meta is fighting on many fronts at once. Although it settled a case for US$17.1bil (RM69.8bil) in August that positioned social media as the Big Tobacco of the 21st century, it is still embroiled in other lawsuits.
Then there is the growing backlash against what critics call its “pervert glasses” (they have been used to secretly record video and audio), which have been banned from courts in England and New York, with organisations like the ACLU alleging that they could become a tool of the surveillance state.
Despite the push into fashion, it doesn’t add up to a great look.
But whatever Zuckerberg’s or his advisers’ agenda, the more he speaks about his life and newfound interest in outfits, the more insight he provides, sometimes inadvertently, into his otherwise highly guarded psyche.
How he approaches clothes is how he approaches everything.
“A few years ago, he made this point,” said Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief of technology. “He said, ‘I’m willing to not be liked. I just want to be understood.’”
Zuckerberg’s fashion sense (or lack of it) has been well-documented, from the laxity of his early California days to the grey Brunello Cucinelli tees he upgraded to during Facebook’s growth.
But his Damascene dressing moment happened during Covid-19, in Hawaii.
He started experimenting with “fun shorts” that no one could see on Zoom. Then friends introduced him to MMA, which led to the boxier "fits".
In this version of the story, Zuckerberg has been freed from the fetters of his self-imposed grey T-shirt prison.
A less charitable view, however, is that his fashion glow-up has been so fortuitously timed that most people assumed it was a marketing choice created by a stylist.
Fashion-wise, he seems to be experiencing a sort of delayed adolescence.
“This is stuff we did in college, or in high school,” said designer Mike Amiri, who helped Zuckerberg design his first high-fashion T-shirt, in 2024, with “Aut Zuck Aut Nihil” embroidered across the front, Latin for “all Zuck or all nothing”.
“You’re figuring out, ‘Am I a baggy fit guy? Am I a vintage type? Who am I?’” Amiri said.
It’s just that Zuckerberg is doing it in his 40s, with unlimited resources.
Lately, Zuckerberg has come to appreciate polos and collared shirts as a compromise between the anti-suit tech world and the reality of having to meet with world leaders.
His plan, he said, is “to find the 20 polo-collared shirts that I like the best”.
“That’s, like, a fun thing to go do, right? Each of these things lend themselves to, like, fun explorations.”
Especially because, he continued, “You start buying some shirts, and then you get a lot more ads for shirts, and then you’re like, ‘Okay, actually, these are better shirts than the ones I bought yesterday.’”
The algorithmic shopping experience he describes is the kind often criticised for hooking users.
But when asked if his new interactions with the app have made him think differently about it, he said, “I’m not sure,” and gazed off into space. Then, “No.”
Even before he embraced designers, Zuckerberg was into design. He calls these projects “side quests”.
Next to his Palo Alto, California, office, he has a room full of machines for making stuff, like a 3D printer, which he used to make a lime green chain-mail dress with one of his three daughters (ages 10, 9 and 3).
Previously, he created customised ski onesies for the whole family with the skiwear company Strafe and surfing recovery outfits with Outerknown. He likes the family to match.
He estimates he has helped design 20 pieces of jewellery for his wife, Priscilla Chan, since they were married in 2012, including a wedding band carved from a single diamond.
It is a simple faceted loop that resembles quartz, but it came with a unique engineering challenge – rings need to be removable in case of emergency.
A diamond saw can cut off gold rings, but it cannot cut diamond, so Zuckerberg built in a breaking point.
In June, Zuckerberg was in New York, hosting an event for the smart glasses that included introducing the Meta line with Kylie Jenner – the one that sparked all the blowback (people accused her of being complicit in making police state technology fashionable).
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Despite the intense criticism of the glasses in some circles, EssilorLuxottica sold more than seven million pairs of the Ray-Ban Metas and Oakley Metas last year.
In the second quarter of 2026, Luxottica announced, the smart glasses doubled in revenue.
Zuckerberg said he thought the backlash was the result of a failure of communication.
Instagram has pledged to remove accounts of anyone posting videos of women taken without their consent.
Meta says it has built-in functionality that causes the glasses’ camera to break if its bright light, which signals it is in use, gets tampered with to enable surreptitious filming (despite rumours, there is currently no facial recognition available, and Meta says it is not being added at this time).
A new style of audio-only Ray-Ban Meta glasses has been added.
Aside from Ray-Ban and Oakley, Meta also has its own line, and new styles are being added to the Kylie line.
There’s the Lisa collaboration, and recently, Meta unveiled a variety of new styles, including new Ray-Bans, bringing the number of available frames to about 100 by year-end. – ©2026 The New York Times Company/Vanessa Friedman
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
