Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Is Transforming A.I., One Leather Jacket at a Time - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/14/style/jensen-huang-nvidia-leather-jackets.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_202
J’adore les articles « style » du New York Times. Quand l’habit fait le moine.
There’s a new tech titan in town and he’s preparing to enter the pantheon. How do we know?
Well, Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, has the company: He co-founded Nvidia in 1993, and the market cap is now about $950 billion, though at the end of May it was briefly in the $1 trillion club, putting it in a similar league to Apple, Alphabet and Amazon.
He has the product: a data processing chip that is key to A.I. development, which is to say, the life of ChatGPT and Bard, which is to say, the current paradigm shift.
And he has the look: a black leather jacket he wears every time he is in the public eye, most often with a black T-shirt and black jeans.
Mr. Huang wore a black leather jacket when he was on the cover of Time as one of its men of the year in 2021. A black leather jacket during his keynote speeches at multiple GTC developer conferences since 2018. To deliver the 2023 World ITF keynote and the 2023 Computex 2023 keynote. He even identified himself, back in a Reddit AMA in 2016, as “the guy in the leather jacket.”
Sometimes his leather jackets have collars, sometimes they look more like motorcycle jackets; sometime a lot of zips are involved, sometimes not. But the jackets are always black. He has been wearing them, a spokesman said, “for at least 20 years.” The point is that he always looks the same.
There hasn’t been a popularly identifiable face of A.I. yet. ChatGPT and Bard are anonymous brains. That’s part of what makes A.I. so eerie — its disembodied nature. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, is ubiquitous, but looks kind of generic. Mr. Huang and his leather jacket are poised to step neatly into that gap.
The jacket is an object that has become a signifier — of a person but also the great leap forward that person represents. And that association puts Mr. Huang in the same club as Steve “black turtleneck” Jobs, Mark “gray T-shirt” Zuckerberg and Jeff “Pitbull” Bezos as a chief executive who understands that the difference between a company that is a world-changing success and a company that is a world-changing success that becomes a part of pop culture may be the image of its figurehead. One that’s just enough of a caricature to work its way into the public imagination and become the avatar of a movement.
To put this in context, Superstar Jacket sells two versions of a “Jensen Huang leather jacket,” alongside a “Fast & Furious 10 Vin Diesel jacket,” a “Snoop Dogg leather jacket” and an “Indiana Jones leather jacket.”
But Mr. Huang is the only C.E.O. to have a jacket named after him.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014. In this role she covers global fashion for both The New York Times and International New York Times. @VVFriedman
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