The Hot Fashion Trends in Silicon Valley, and the Top Chef Niki Nakayama

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2019

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Silicon Valley has a reputation for being a place where young geniuses are too busy disrupting the world to buy clothes; jeans and a hoodie generally qualify as business attire. But that is changing, the New Yorker fashion correspondent Rachel Syme notes. Tech moguls have become more conscious of appearances, and a distinctive look—based on optimized, streamlined garments, like trendy Allbirds sneakers—is emerging. Tech moguls have become more conscious of appearances, for better or worse; Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, raised hundreds of millions of dollars partly on the image she cultivated with a turtleneck à la Steve Jobs. Syme spoke with the professional stylist Victoria Hitchcock, who runs a thriving practice in Silicon Valley showing the powerful how to project “powerful” for the digital age—without looking like a bunch of bankers. Plus, Helen Rosner talks with Niki Nakayama, one of Los Angeles’s top chefs, about setting up a kitchen that is hospitable to women, and about the impossibility of creating authentically Japanese cuisine in America.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:09.3	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. You remember the story of Elizabeth Holmes, the young tech billionaire and scam artist. Holmes raised some $400 million for her company, Theranos, by selling venture
0:23.2	capitalists on a revolutionary medical technology that simply didn't exist.
0:28.9	HBO is releasing a documentary this month about her extraordinary rise and fall.
0:34.1	One thing about Holmes that's always remarked on was that she somehow looked apart, every inch the tech visionary wearing a black turtleneck very much in the style of the late Steve Jobs, which is, let's just say, a loaded choice to make in Silicon Valley. In the famously casual tech world, it turns out that image matters and more than you might think.
0:55.8	I'm Rachel Syme, and I am a contributor to the New Yorker who writes the on and off the
1:01.5	Avenue fashion column. The thing that I'm interested in vis-a-vis fashion is there's nothing more
1:07.4	fun than figuring out what looks good on your very, very individual unique body.
1:12.7	And then tailoring your style to that, playing, experimenting. And that's not what you're going to
1:20.1	see in Silicon Valley. What you're going to see is streamlined and sleek. And yeah, it's almost,
1:26.3	it goes along with the tech thing, right? Everything's
1:28.0	about optimization and getting better and constantly refining the algorithm. And I think people are
1:33.6	trying to do that with their clothes too. I did a story earlier this year for the New Yorker on
1:38.4	Allbirds, which is the sneaker brand in San Francisco right now. And it is reaching like a crazy valuation. And it's really
1:46.5	popular in the valley because it's this sort of streamlined shoe that costs the same, no matter which
1:53.5	style you get. And they're all super functional and made of sustainable materials. It's like all these people that are constantly like data mining their life for how can I improve,
2:06.3	charting their sleep cycle and they're doing transcendental meditation and they're having
2:11.0	soilant for lunch.
2:12.0	They want to streamline their life down to the exact number of factors that makes them the bionic human.
2:21.7	And that makes me think about Elizabeth Holmes, who founded Theranos.
2:26.1	Elizabeth Holmes wore the same thing to work every day.
2:28.8	A black turtleneck, black pants, and black flat shoes.
	...

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