David’s fashion critiques spot on
In a midseries episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David, the HBO show’s star and creator, greets his No. 1 frenemy, Susie, (Susie Essman), who has turned up at a fancy gathering wearing a top hat and a morning coat.
He gives her a once-over, then announces, with all the finesse of a carnival barker, “Ladies and gentlemen, the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.” Susie shoots him a stink eye. “Like you know anything about fashion,” she sneers.
But David, 76, might beg to differ. On “Curb,” which just ended its 12th and final season, he spews barbs like pepper spray, weighing in caustically on a welter of issues: Who gets to consume the larger share of a dessert, to cut in line, to sit at the cool kids’ table?
But his most impassioned critiques have largely centered on fashion and on tartly deconstructing what his friends and other people are wearing.
Throughout his career, David, a Mr. Blackwell of television comedy, has trained a gimlet eye on human foibles.
As a creator, executive producer and head writer for seven seasons of “Seinfeld,” he also lent that show his shrewd observational powers. Even those who have not watched “Seinfeld” may have heard of the puffy shirt, the braless wonder or the fictionalized J. Peterman catalog company, which was inspired by a real business of the same name.
Then, as now, David operates on the premise
that few things are funnier or more revealing than the coded messages we send when we dress.
His signature style — an obsessively considered amalgam of long-sleeve polo shirts, tan trousers, nondescript hoodies, blazers and sneakers — seems meant to telegraph the status and breezy self-assurance of a Hollywood bigwig. So do the baseball caps he often wears on screen and off, which have featured logos for the luxury island resort Amanyara and for Air Mail, a digital newsletter catering to an affluent crowd.
David makes no secret that his one-look-fits-all approach is meant in part to paste over his own class anxieties and to simultaneously prop up a shaky self-image. And he is determined to fit in whatever the circumstance.
Sartorially, he has adopted a distinctive credo: Wear one nice item at a time — “otherwise it’s too much,” he once told GQ. “You have to be halfdressed. That’s my fashion theory: Half is more.”
Excess is repugnant to David, and calling it out has been a through line in his work. His proliferating list of aversions in “Curb” include floppy shorts and tucked-in shirts on men, extra-long shoelaces, bow ties, bedazzled sweatshirts and affectation in any form.
On “Curb,” David reserves some of his sharpest zingers for people who are trying too hard. In a midseries episode, his housemate Leon (J.B. Smoove), doing his best impersonation of an accountant, wears a suit with a bow tie and spectacles. “What’s with this suit?,” David asks. “You look like Farrakhan.”
He is no less affronted when people’s garb seems inconsistent with their professional standing. After seeing his psychiatrist prancing on a beach in a skimpy Speedo in an early episode, he starts to question the doctor’s bona fides.
In another episode, David casts a cool eye on Paula, an escort who is turned out in the standard trappings of her trade: a bustier, a tiny skirt and fishnet hose. “Why this outfit?” he asks benignly, going on to suggest that her business could pick up if she wore something more discreet.
She takes him up on his suggestion, trading her spandex for cashmere, and, wouldn’t you know, business prospers. David, who knows perfectly well what his status-conscious peers would expect from a hooker, couldn’t be happier, announcing beatifically that he has performed a mitzvah.
Yet again, his critique proves spot on.