Just before Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday from Nvidia, the Silicon Valley chip juggernaut he founded three decades ago, an uncanny photo of him made the internet rounds: Huang, in what appeared to be a haute-punk Saint Laurent jacket.
It wasn’t strange to see Huang in a leather jacket. After all, rare is the public appearance where Huang doesn’t wear one. He wore one on the cover of Time in 2021 and at Nvidia’s keynote in March. In a 2016 Reddit AMA, he described himself as “the guy in the leather jacket.” (A flat descriptor that sounds as if it could be applied to a video game avatar or a cartoon character.)
But this one was well beyond his typical style: drenched in studs, with fat flapped lapels. It was also, to fashion collectors, a coveted jewel, stemming from Hedi Slimane’s tenure at the French luxury house.
Alas, it was an artifact of A.I. fakery. (Nvidia confirmed that the photo had been doctored.)
To the many gawkers who followed the chronicle of his affairs this week, the executive’s more over-the-top Billy Idol-esque leather simmered with midlife crisis energy — the clothing equivalent of a new Porsche. The studded jacket in the A.I.-generated image seemed to declare “you can’t tame me!” as his company’s stock price, and reputation, crumbled. People ate it up, even as it was debunked.
Still, the photo brought into focus how perhaps even Huang’s leather jackets — the real ones — were an indication of a man branding himself as too much of a renegade.
People who pick a signature-item outfit are often searching for a memorable shorthand to distill their broader tastes or temperament. It’s a Silicon Valley self-branding hack, much like Steve Jobs’s turtlenecks and Mark Zuckerberg’s drab-fab T-shirts.
That Huang chose a leather jacket and not, say, a blazer or windbreaker, was significant. It taps into all our cultural connotations of “go their own way” guys: Tom Cruise in “Top Gun,” Marlon Brando in “The Wild One,” Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider.” It’s a garment for a conqueror: You’re wearing another living thing’s skin, after all. It can be evocative, even a bit sexy.
Just about every profile of Huang in the past decade mentions his jackets. He could count on interviewers to ask about them, granting him an easy opportunity to talk about something other than computing power.
In a 2023 interview with HP, Huang demurred when the host described him as a “style star,” crediting, as he had before, his daughter and his wife, Lori, for dressing him like a tech-world Terminator. That styling credit was seized on by online commenters this week as evidence of Huang’s closeness with his wife of more than 40 years.
In the interview, Huang wore, of course, a leather jacket. It appears to be the same glossy Tom Ford number that Sotheby’s auction house sold for nearly $1 million this year. The house described the jacket as “a symbol for the vision at the forefront of the A.I. revolution.”
When Nvidia was on the rise, the leathers helped accentuate the idea of Huang as a maverick whose company was poised for our present A.I. boom.
This week, as details emerged about Huang’s affair with a Chinese businesswoman, and the revelation that he had a second extramarital relationship with an Nvidia executive, the leather jacket began to seem less rebellious than reckless.
