When Curb Your Enthusiasm emerged in 2000, the cult sitcom’s irascible star and creator, Larry David, wasn’t exactly a bastion of style. But over the critically acclaimed HBO comedy’s 12-season run, which draws to a close in the coming weeks, David has evolved into an unexpected fashion role model.
“Larry David is one of the bestdressed men on television,” New York magazine declared in 2020. On TikTok, videos from the likes of stylist Allison Bornstein examine the looks of an “accidental style icon”, celebrating the “classic, layered and practical” elements. Fashion publications have implored readers to channel his “laid-back dad style”. He has appeared on the front row at New York fashion week – admittedly with his fingers in his ears due to the loud music – and on the front of T-shirts, with one reading: “You’re allowed to be happy, but not in front of me.”
David has come a long way from The Pants Tent of the first episode, which centred on the awkward way his beige slacks bunched up around the groin when he sat down.
The David look entails plain, high-quality white Cotton Citizen T-shirts, well-fitting blazers, cashmere sweatshirts in muted colours, his favoured Ecco shoes and signature Oliver Peoples round glasses. On the golf course, David adds a windbreaker and a baseball cap bearing the logo of former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s newsletter, or the word “Menemsha”, the name of a village on Martha’s Vineyard. None of it screams stylishness or a great interest in current trends, more just a man who knows what he likes and is comfortable wearing it.
The author and cultural commentator Jason Diamond calls David’s look “post-normcore”. “It’s normal, but it’s sneaky. He dresses really well, but there’s nothing flashy about it … He’s actually one of the smartest dressers on TV.”
He likens David’s style to the “smart casual” look often found in Nora Ephron or Steve Martin films in the late 1980s and early 90s. “It’s very subtle and so people don’t really pick up on it.” Jerry Seinfeld once described the look as “Upper West Side communist”.
As with everything, David is exacting about clothes. In real life he is the son of a garment-district salesman, and approaches getting dressed with a rulebook. As he told GQ in 2020: “One should wear only one ‘nice’ piece of clothing at a time. Otherwise it’s too much. Too dressed. You have to be half dressed. That’s my fashion theory, since you asked: Half Is More.” This is the kind of pithy rule that translates well on TikTok.
But clothes to one side, “a big part of it”, Diamond says, “is he’s so confident … those shots of him just sort of gangling, walking down the street”. In our era of quiet luxury, it makes sense that such understated nonchalance would be finding fans.