Fashion forward: Why Steve Jobs chose this designer’s turtlenecks

NEW YORK: Little wonder, really, that Issey Miyake was Steve Jobs’s favourite designer. The man behind Jobs’s personal uniform of black mock turtlenecks, who died on Aug. 5 at age 84, was a pioneer in all sorts of ways — the first foreign designer to show at Paris Fashion Week (in April 1974), among the first designers to collaborate with artists and a proponent of “comfort dressing” long before the term ever existed. But it was his understanding and appreciation of technology and how it could be harnessed to an aesthetic point of view to create new, seductive utilities that set Miyake apart.

Before there were wearables, before there were connected jackets, before there were 3-D-printed sneakers and laser-cut lace, there was Miyake, pushing the boundaries of material innovation to bridge past and future. He was the original champion of fashion tech.

This is where the black turtleneck comes in. It was not by any means Miyake’s most interesting garment. It may even have been his most banal. But it embodies his founding principles and serves as the door through which anyone not particularly interested in fashion could walk to discover the Miyake universe. Jobs did just that.

Indeed, it is not incidental that Jobs’s own exposure to Miyake came through technology. Or so the late Apple founder, told Walter Isaacson, his biographer. According to Isaacson’s book, “Steve Jobs,” Jobs was fascinated by the uniform jacket Miyake created for Sony workers in 1981. Made from ripstop nylon with no lapels, it included sleeves that could be unzipped to transform the jacket into a vest. Jobs liked it and what it stood for (corporate bonding) so much that he asked Miyake to make a similar style for Apple’s employees — though when he returned to Cupertino with the idea, he was “booed off the stage,” he told Isaacson.

Still, according to Isaacson’s book, the two men became friends, and Jobs would often visit Miyake, ultimately adopting a Miyake garment — the black mock turtleneck — as a key part of his own uniform. It was a garment that did away with an extraneous fold at the neck, that had the ease of a T-shirt and a sweatshirt but also the cool, minimal lines of a jacket.

Miyake made him “like a hundred of them,” Jobs, who wore them until his death in 2011, said in the book. (Isaacson wrote he saw them stacked in Jobs’s closet, and the book’s cover features a portrait of Jobs wearing, natch, a black mock turtleneck.)

Even more than his Levi’s 501s and New Balance shoes, the turtleneck became synonymous with Jobs’s particular blend of genius and his focus: the way he settled on a uniform to reduce the number of decisions he had to make in the mornings, the better to focus on his work. It was an approach to dress later adopted by adherents including Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama. Also his ability to blend soft-corner elegance and utility in not just his own style but the style of his products. As Ryan Tate wrote in Gawker, the turtleneck “helped make him the world’s most recognizable C.E.O.”

Friedman is a journalist with NYT©2022