Style guru for powerful men
Andrew Weitz helps CEOs, tech billionaires and sports stars dress to impress. Here the US style guru gives his fashion tips and explains why David Beckham, Tom Brady and Prince Charles are getting it right – while George Clooney, Mark Zuckerberg and Donal
BEFORE he spends thousands of dollars of your money on sharp suits, tailored jeans and designer trainers that you’ll never use for actual exercise, Andrew Weitz likes to introduce himself properly. Typically, this means he turns up at your house and makes a detailed study of your wardrobe. Then he culls nearly everything in sight.
“He pretty much throws your entire closet away,” says Neil Jacobson, president of Geffen Records in Los Angeles, who’s a client of The Weitz Effect, a consultancy that dresses several of the most influential men in California. The process is traumatic to begin with but worth it, according to Neil, who freely admits to a prior history of “ridiculous” clothes purchases that didn’t suit or fit him.
Andrew helped him to find new clothes that hung properly and worked together so he could feel sartorially “secure” in any situation. “It’s not that I feel fabulous. It’s that I know I get it right. And that’s really, really special,” he says.
For me, Andrew is happy to skip the wardrobe purge for an initial planning meeting over coffee at Soho House, a trendy restaurant high above LA’s Sunset Boulevard. Andrew (44) isn’t a stylist and loathes the word. He wants to get that straight early on. “I’m a style consultant,” he declares. “I’m a style adviser.” His thing is to teach the man inside the clothes to find his personal style.
After spending more than a decade as a leading Hollywood talent agent whose roster included actors Rob Lowe, Ricky Gervais and James Corden, he formed his consultancy four years ago. He now works with around 80 CEOs, company chairmen, senior executives of the likes of Disney and HBO, entrepreneurs, writers, directors, sportsmen, tech leaders, upwardly mobile assistants and a gaggle of mid-level businessmen.
At first the clients were all men but he’s now hired by women too. He prides himself on his discretion so most of the names are secret, but Tom Brady, the American football superstar, has been open about using The Weitz Effect, and billionaire Elon Musk is also thought to have sought Andrew’s advice.
It definitely helps that he’s a married man with a studio executive wife and 10-month-old twins – this gives him licence to prod, tweak and pinch his male clients’ outfits and to compliment them without causing any uneasiness.
So what on Earth do you wear to meet the guy? It took me a while to decide. Perhaps I should’ve dressed like he sometimes does, in a fine Italian blazer and slacks with a silk pocket square, velvet tasselled loafers and a watch that costs more than my car, but for obvious reasons that wasn’t really an option.
In the end I went with an outfit I’d usually wear to interview someone or to go out for dinner: navy chinos, my white Oxford shirt, my best navy V-neck and a trusty pair of well-made boots. And sitting here at this moment, about half an hour into my first conversation with Andrew, at a table in this chic room, with all of Los Angeles spread out below us, it’s a look I feel pretty good about.
“What you’re wearing now?” he says suddenly. “I’d say you should be wearing a different shirt.” What? “A different polo or button-up.” He has a winning manner and a soothing voice that takes the sting out of even the bluntest feedback. Er, why not this shirt? Andrew reflects for a moment. “It depends what you’re trying to achieve. There’s the rumpled ‘I-don’tgive-a-s**t’ look and then there’s, ‘I wan- na be more polished’.” He presses on. “I look at you, I think to myself, ‘Works from home. He’s a journalist, but he goes out. He’s not the talent but if he’s going to interview someone he can’t look like a schlump’.”
Fortunately he has a plan to save me from this awful fate and he proceeds to outline it, oblivious to the soul-searching he’s just set off (I really like that shirt). “My look for you is something very cool, something age-appropriate, something you’re comfortable in, something edgy. And yes, you need a suit and we definitely need a blazer too.”
In other words, if it’s the rumpled “I-don’t-give-a-s**t” look that I’m set on, there’s probably nothing more he can teach me. I’ve already mastered that one. But if I want to try something a little sharper, The Weitz Effect is here to help.
His thing is to teach the man inside the clothes to find his personal style
NOBODY would ever accuse Andrew of looking like a schlump. He’s 1,87m tall, lean, fit and rangy, with perfect stubble and neat, greying hair he gets cut every other Wednesday. He owns more than 40 pairs of glasses and six watches. Today, the watch is a Rolex. He’s sporting a green James Perse T-shirt beneath a navy Paul Smith zip-up cardigan that has bright stripes on one side only, some stone AG jeans and a pair of camel suede
Isaia monk-strap shoes with white rubber soles that I think cost $560 (about R7 560). This is Andrew dressed down.
In his previous life, when he was named one of the best-dressed agents in the film business by respected film industry magazine The Hollywood Reporter, he was a bit more “dandy” than he is now, he says. “What gave me a competitive edge was I wasn’t wearing a black, navy, grey suit. I was wearing three-piece. I was wearing double-breasted. I was wearing skinnier legs. I was wearing pocket watches, pocket squares, things that made me stand out, that made me memorable. People knew me as the pocket-square guy.”
Now his personal style has evolved.
He describes it as “sporty, smart, upper casual, conservative with a pop, with an edge and a little bit of street”. Whatever that means, it seems to work. Andrew gets complimented on what he’s wearing “every single day, more than once”. GQ magazine put him on its 2017 list of the 50 best-dressed men in the world.
“The way you present yourself is the way people will perceive you,” he says. Everyone can benefit from thinking more about this. Not everybody can afford The Weitz Effect though. “With what I do, it’s not worth hiring me unless you’re going to spend $10 000 (R135 000).”
At one point, I ask what he’d say to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg if he had a chance to pitch his services to him. Andrew doesn’t miss a beat: “He needs me because he’s in the public eye. He’s on the world stage. I think it’s important not just to think it doesn’t matter and wear jeans and a T-shirt. There’s a time and a place for that. Yeah, you’re rich. Yeah, you work in the tech world. But guess what? Those days are over. You’re not a 25-yearold billionaire who just made it.”
You can picture Zuckerberg blinking through this withering appraisal and briefly wondering if he really does need a pocket square. The social-media king did dress more smartly for his testimony to Congress in April, Andrew concedes, but it “could’ve been better”.
I’m sure the suit he was wearing cost a fortune, I say. Andrew scoffs. “You hear a lot of guys go, this is Armani, this is Ralph Lauren, this is Tom Ford. I don’t care what it is. It’s not about the label. It’s how you wear it.”
AMONTH passes before we meet again to go shopping. In that time Andrew dresses two guests for the royal wedding. He expects they’ll become Weitz Effect regulars. Both are entertainment industry veterans who’d worked with Meghan Markle, the new Duchess of Sussex. Andrew told them, “This is royalty – you’re not going to the Emmys,” and sought out something more “refined” than their usual red-carpet dinner jackets.
In May he flew to New York specifically to dress Tom Brady for the Met Gala. For this project, he worked with Versace to produce three different black-tie looks for the world’s most-acclaimed American footballer, who’s also married to model Gisele Bündchen and is himself a bit of a clothes horse. Tom ended up picking the most unorthodox of the three outfits: one featuring a black dinner jacket with gold rococo swirls all over the lapels and black trousers with gold crystal on them. “The next day, clearly, the only man you’re talking about at the Met Gala is Tom Brady,” Andrew says.
This is indeed true, but not necessarily in a good way. There was a lot of mockery. One person remarked that the quarterback looked like “a Las Vegas magician”. Andrew shrugs it all off. “Tom’s awesome, and he was up for it. Listen, if it didn’t look right I would’ve said no.”
Rodeo Drive in the heart of Beverly Hills is Andrew’s unofficial office. He’s waiting for me by the Luxe hotel, across the palm tree-lined road from Gucci and Prada and near to the Rolex shop. He looks a million dollars, which I suppose means he’s getting good value out of an outfit that probably costs only about one-twelfth of that. Today he’s wearing a purple Brunello Cucinelli sweatshirt, a striped Gucci shirt, navy Salvatore Ferragamo trousers with a drawstring waist, London Sock Company socks, brown Berluti shoes that are a sort of brogue/trainer hybrid and a Patek Philippe Nautilus watch. He’s clutching his phone and his money clip in his right hand. “It’s a rule,” he says, as we stride across the road to Brioni. “No man should put anything in their front pocket.” It ruins your outline, stretches the trousers and is just plain unsightly.
“Do you know Brioni?” Andrew asks as we stroll into the shop. I don’t. It’s apparently the pinnacle of Italian luxury menswear: a place for people who take their tailoring very, very seriously indeed – sample price: $650 (R8 775) for a polo shirt. We head straight upstairs to a VIP area where we sit on a cream sofa. Es-
‘What gave me a competitive edge was that I wasn’t wearing a black, navy, grey suit. I was wearing things that made me stand out’
Apresso is served. Waiting in the fitting area is a rack of leather jackets, two shirts and four suits or blazers in my size – all picked out by Andrew in advance.
I try on a blue suit that is, by a distance, the nicest thing I’ve ever worn in my life. An in-house tailor is summoned and, under Andrew’s meticulous direction, he fills the trousers with pins to make it fit even better. Later, while very carefully removing the trousers, I first snag my boxer shorts on one of the pins and then accidentally stab myself.
Other highlights of my Brioni selection include a cardigan (“You seem like a guy who can rock a cardigan,” Andrew says with a commendably straight face), and a long-sleeved polo shirt that feels lovely. Then we’re done with Brioni. It’s an entirely painless shopping experience – although only because I haven’t actually bought anything in this harrowingly expensive place. NDREW grew up in an upper middle-class family in Philadelphia, the younger son of a successful electrical engineer father and of a housewife mother with a sharp eye for style. At 11 he already cared enough about clothes to beg his mother to buy him a particular grey quilted jacket.
He studied communications and marketing at George Washington University, where a roommate impressed him with his style and Andrew swopped his oversized ’90s clothes for a “cleaned-up” preppy look. Afterwards he moved to Los Angeles to become a talent agent.
Among his colleagues he stood out for his flamboyant dress sense. He began informally advising clients and other people he knew about how to dress. Eight years ago at his stag weekend in Las Vegas a friend made a speech. Since starting to buy clothes with Andrew, he said, he’d lost weight and enjoyed a marked uplift in his business affairs. “He said, ‘I owe everything to Andrew. If I hadn’t met him I’d be in a ditch somewhere’.”
Andrew started to well up. He realised, “This has to be what I’m meant to do.” It took another four years for him to take the plunge and change career direction. He’s convinced there’s a renaissance under way in men’s style and that he’s caught that wave. Weitz Effect clients can choose from a range of programmes, the costs of which vary (and aren’t publicly disclosed).
The ’20s and ’30s are his favourite decades for clothes, but he also thinks there are more stylish men around today than there’ve ever been, and cites Brady and former soccer star David Beckham, and basketball player LeBron James. Actor Jeff Goldblum “knows when to turn it up and when to tone it down”, and “always infuses a youthfulness into his personal style” without trying to dress younger than he is.
Actor-director George Clooney, obviously, looks great in his suits, but he also disappoints Andrew sometimes. “I think he could do better,” he says.
“He’s George Clooney. I think he could’ve done better at the royal wedding.” He could’ve worn a morning suit, Andrew suggests. He thinks the royal groom looked great on the day: “He’s a prince, he’s got a great body, he’s young and he’s tailored.” He admires Harry’s dad, though – Prince Charles is always elegant, he says. “Look what he wears. It’s gorgeous.”
President Emmanuel Macron of France is a shining example of a politician who knows how to dress – his look is “tailored and he’s a fit guy”. former US president Barack Obama has become “more fitted and styled” as the years have gone by, but could Andrew make Donald Trump look good?
“Yes, I think I could,” he says. “He’s a big guy, but if you’re well tailored to accentuate your body you’ll come off as more powerful, more elegant and more put together. And – most importantly – play with some of his tie selections.” Trump should wear his diagonal striped ties more often, instead of his red ones, and “we should definitely shorten them”.
Although he declines to talk about who in the public eye dresses badly he will say what he hates: square-toed shoes, ill-fitting jeans, billowing shirts, blazers and suit jackets that are several sizes too big. Do these offences cause him physical discomfort? “No, it makes me want to speak to them, to jump into the photo, into the TV. I want to help.”
His ambitions aren’t modest. “I’m definitely creating an industry. I’m here to help and build an empire. Everyone’s going to know what The Weitz Effect is in two years, if they don’t already.”