Larry David Says Men Should Always Be Half-Dressed
What it is, and why you should listen to him.
By all accounts, Larry David is a hugely successful man. After a decade as something of an itinerant comedy writer, he gained power and influence as the co-creator of Seinfeld before a similarly meta HBO special spawned Curb Your Enthusiasm, which is about to return for its tenth season.
Second only to the delight of a new season of Curb is the GQ profile of the comedian published ahead of its release. It’s packed with loads of Davidian tidbits like that he just named his dog after Bernie Sanders and says hi to Johnny Mathis when he sees him at their shared country club. Most importantly, however, is the Larry David code of fashion: Only wear one “nice” piece of clothing at a time.
“Otherwise it’s too much,” he says. “Too dressed. You have to be half-dressed. That’s my fashion theory, since you asked: Half Is More.”
Why the hell should you listen to Larry David, whose most prominent onscreen role for most of his career was as a perpetually unseen George Steinbrenner? There are a few reasons.
“David chooses or approves all the wardrobe for Curb Your Enthusiasm, and then he keeps all the clothes, from blazers to socks, creating a seamless visual loop between Larry and the character he calls TV Larry,” the piece says.
The de facto costumer for a long-running television show is probably someone whose fashion advice is worth considering, but David’s bona fides run deeper than that. His dad was a salesman in the Garment District of New York, and some of his fashion sense rubbed off on his son. The first joke in Seinfeld had to do with the placement of a button on a shirt, and the first episode of Curb is called “The Pants Tent” for obvious reasons.
David’s tastes run expensive—Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren, Salvatore Ferrgamo, and Prada are among the brands he wears—but there’s something frugal about his overall look, repurposed as they are from his TV alter-ego and, in what might be a first for the magazine, the wardrobe for his GQ cover shoot.
You can see what TV Larry is up to—and what he wears—when season 10 of Curb Your Enthusiasm premieres on January 19 at 10:30 p.m. on HBO.
