In February 2026, Mark Zuckerberg spent nearly eight hours on the stand in a Los Angeles courtroom, testifying in a bellwether lawsuit accusing Meta and YouTube of designing platforms addictive enough to harm a 20-year-old plaintiff’s mental health. Under questioning about whether he had the credentials to judge his own platform’s effects on children, he told the court, “I don’t have a college degree in anything.” Eight days later, he was front row at Prada in Milan , inconspicuously dressed in a tan collared shirt, brown trousers, , seated beside Anna Wintour and Instagram’s head of fashion partnerships while the jury back home was still hearing testimonies. A month after that, the jury found Meta and YouTube liable and awarded the plaintiff $6 million. The same week, the White House named Zuckerberg to its new Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, co-chaired by David Sacks. Whatever else is true about the kind of year the Meta founder-CEO is having, nobody can accuse him of being under-scheduled.
What’s interesting here is not the lawsuit, not the verdict, not the council appointment. It’s the wardrobe rotation. Follow Zuckerberg’s wardrobe for two decades and it makes for a pretty clean case study in status psychology, playing out in real time by a guy who has never once had to worry about his rent.
There was the gray hoodie, worn from Facebook’s earliest years until it very publicly wasn’t: April 2018, hauled in front of a joint Senate committee over Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg showed up in a suit so unfamiliar on him that The Cut asked (not entirely kindly), who this little sweetie in a big-boy suit was, while Slate ran a full sartorial teardown and the New York Times‘s Vanessa Friedman dryly noted that he’d presumably go right back to hoodies once he was home. Then came the gold-chain years, 2023 into 2024 , a birthday photo at his desk in a graphic tee and a chain thick enough to anchor a boat, part of what can be described as a calculated courtship of the “based” wing of tech Twitter, right around the time he’d also taken up Brazilian jiu-jitsu and started talking about “masculine energy” in corporate culture. And now: a black suit and maroon tie at Trump’s 2025 inauguration, seated a few chairs from Bezos, who wore an equally dark suit and an oxblood tie; the quiet-luxury Prada cameo mid-trial; a seat on a council that will help write the AI policy of the next several years. The hoodie is gone. The chain has gone into hiding. The suit is back, and apparently, so is the desire to be read as a serious man among serious men.
Did the hoodie ever cost Zuckerberg a penny? And if it doesn’t, if this trick just quietly backs down the minute an institution with real teeth comes through the door, what does that say about who gets to use it, and what it might cost the people who do?
In 1920, Edward Thorndike coined the term halo effect- a single positive impression, an attractive face, a firm handshake, quietly upgrades our judgment of someone’s entirely unrelated traits, from their honesty to their intelligence. Clothes have always been one of the fastest triggers of this. A 2024 study put the bias under lab conditions: participants rated identical employees as more or less ethical purely based on how their outfits were described to them, nothing else about the employees’ behavior having changed at all. On average, Business formal reads as more trustworthy than casual. Case closed you’d think, suit up and get judged kindly.
Except the same study complicates its own headline. Business casual, not full formal wear, was the only style rated positively across every context the researchers tested. Full business formal sometimes swung the other way entirely, read by participants as compensatory, even a little try-hard , as though the wearer was overcorrecting for something. The researchers built context directly into their model as a moderating variable, because the same blazer that reads as competent in a law firm reads as costume in a startup. The halo effect, in other words, was never really about formality in the abstract. It was about whether your clothes matched what the room already expected a credible person in your specific position to be wearing.
Call it the inverse halo, the flip side of dressing down that reads as confidence, not carelessness. This is not a term used in the clinical literature, but shorthand for a narrower phenomenon than the halo effect in general. If a room’s settled expectations for someone at your level of established status already includes “does not need to dress up,” then dressing down isn’t a violation of the room’s fit rule. It’s obedience to a different, quieter rule the room has already agreed to apply just to you. This is why a physics postdoc’s mismatched socks read as adorable evidence of a mind on higher things, while the identical socks on a job-seeking accountant read as someone who doesn’t respect the interview. The hoodie, on Zuckerberg building Facebook out of a Harvard dorm room, was never really “dressing down” in any meaningful sense. It was the uniform his particular status already demanded of him ( closer to Steve Jobs’s black turtleneck)– a costume so consistent it became a kind of trademark, rather than an actual risk.
The reverse halo only works if you’ve already built trust with people. Zuckerberg can show up to a shareholder meeting in a T-shirt, because no one is questioning if he’s capable. However, if a first-time founder shows up to a pitch meeting in the very same outfit, they don’t get that benefit. Before Zuckerberg says a word, everyone in the room already knows who he is and what he’s built. His casualness does not build credibility; it works because the credibility is there.
“Casual Friday” spread through corporate America in the 1990s as a genuine loosening of dress codes but it never applied evenly, even within a single office. The junior associate who tries it before making partner is taking on a small, real career risk that the managing partner isn’t. The privilege was never really “you may dress casually.” It was “you may dress casually without anyone downgrading their estimate of you for it” , and that second clause is the one doing all the work, extended only to people whose competence has already been separately established, in writing, on a track record someone senior is willing to vouch for. Strip away that clause and casual dress is just casual dress, judged on its own unglamorous terms.
That clause, worth noting, is also unevenly distributed along lines that have nothing to do with competence at all. The research on professional dress codes and racial bias , the pressure that led, in the U.S., to state-level CROWN Act legislation protecting natural Black hairstyles in the workplace , makes a related point from a different angle: what reads as “acceptable casual” or “unprofessional” has never been neutral, and the reverse halo, when you look at who actually gets to cash it, skews overwhelmingly toward young, white, already-wealthy men in one very specific industry. A Black founder showing up in a hoodie is not drawing on the same cultural memory bank Zuckerberg is drawing on, whatever his balance sheet says.
The clearest way to see the reverse halo is to watch it fail. Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX founder, built his entire public persona on aggressive undress: cargo shorts, oversized T-shirts, sneakers, in nearly every setting, reportedly telling a colleague that the only people he’d wear long pants for were Congress. For a while it worked exactly the way the reverse halo is supposed to work , the disheveled-genius routine read, to investors and journalists alike, as evidence he was too busy thinking about effective altruism and crypto market structure to bother with a blazer.
Then FTX collapsed, and a judge ordered the U.S. Marshals to accept and maintain three suits, four dress shirts, three ties, a belt, and appropriate undergarments so that Bankman-Fried could change out of jail clothing for his fraud trial. Photographs from the courthouse show him visibly uncomfortable in the suits , untucking his shirt the moment he was back outside, letting his tie flap loose, at one point taking the stand in what reporters described as a slightly oversized slate-gray suit with a pastel purple tie that didn’t quite fit. A defense attorney told reporters plainly that the wardrobe change was necessary because “from the moment the jury sees you, they in their mind are making judgments about you.” The reverse halo had evaporated the instant an institution with the power to convict him walked into the room, and no amount of formalwear bought back the trust that had been lost. Bankman-Fried was convicted on all counts.
The lesson isn’t that formal clothes fix reputations once trust is gone , clearly they don’t. It’s that casual clothes were never the source of trust in the first place. They were a costume layered on top of trust other people had already extended for other reasons: a Stanford-professor father, a hedge-fund pedigree, a story about effective altruism that flattered wealthy donors’ self-image. Once those other reasons collapsed, the shorts stopped reading as genius and started reading, correctly, as exactly what they were.
Two research findings are worth keeping separate, because they’re often blurred together in service of a bigger claim than either one supports. In 2012, the psychologists Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky ran an experiment: participants who believed they were wearing a doctor’s white coat showed measurably better sustained attention on a task than participants wearing the identical coat after being told it belonged to a house painter (Adam & Galinsky, 2012). Same fabric, same buttons, different story attached to it, different result. They called this “enclothed cognition” , clothes don’t just broadcast a signal outward, they also seem to shift the wearer’s own processing, provided the clothes carry symbolic weight the wearer actually believes in.
Three years later, Michael Slepian and colleagues, across five separate studies, found that wearing more formal clothing consistently pushed participants toward more abstract, big-picture thinking, while more casual clothing kept them locked into concrete, in-the-weeds processing (Slepian et al., 2015). Crucially, the effect was mediated by felt power: the formal clothes made people feel more powerful, and it was that feeling , not the fabric itself , that widened the aperture of their thinking.
Both of these are narrow, single-session, task-specific lab findings, with the kind of modest effect sizes typical of social-psychology experiments of that era, and neither one is a license to make sweeping claims about a specific afternoon of policymaking twelve years later. It would be a stretch , one this piece isn’t going to fully make , to say that Zuckerberg’s shirt on any given day at the White House is measurably narrowing or widening his thinking about AI regulation. What’s fair to raise, more modestly, is a question the research leaves genuinely open: is a hundred-billion-dollar net worth the same kind of felt power as the one Slepian’s participants got from a blazer, moment to moment, task to task? The studies were measuring shifts sourced from what someone happened to be wearing on a given day, not a background sense of importance banked over decades. Status might well insulate a person from being judged for a hoodie by other people in the room. Whether it insulates that same person’s own thinking from wearing one is a separate question, and not one the existing literature actually answers.
What the Bankman-Fried case adds to this is a small, useful data point in the opposite direction: a man who by his own account felt at his most confident in shorts and a T-shirt, and who by every visual account felt smaller, stiffer, and more constrained the moment institutional power forced him into a suit he didn’t choose. If enclothed cognition cuts both ways, then formalwear imposed under duress may do the opposite of what Slepian’s voluntary formalwear did , a possibility the existing studies, built around participants who chose or were randomly assigned clothes in a lab, were never designed to test.
This pattern has been described here mostly through men in tech, because that’s where it’s cheapest and most visible, but it isn’t only a story about gender or industry. A woman in an identical hoodie at an identical shareholder meeting likely isn’t read the same way; the “brilliant but can’t be bothered to dress” story has historically attached itself to absent minded professors and eccentric engineers, rarely to women doing the same job in the same building. A surgeon’s scrubs or a judge’s robe carry an authority the wearer never has to negotiate for while a teacher or nurse who tries the “too important to dress up” move is usually just read as unprofessional. The reverse halo effect clusters around industries and identities already given the benefit of the doubt, whatever the wearer’s actual competence.
The next time someone’s studied carelessness reads to you as confidence, the founder in the hoodie, the professor who can’t be bothered to iron a shirt, the useful question isn’t “does this outfit signal competence.” It’s “what’s underwriting that read and would it survive an audience that could actually hurt him.” Usually the answer isn’t the outfit at all. It’s an amount of prior, unaccountable status doing the work with the clothing merely supplying the story you get to tell yourself about why you already trust him. That story evaporates the instant an institution that can genuinely hold someone accountable walks in: a courtroom, a congressional committee, a jury, a president who needs a tech executive compliant rather than cool.
Zuckerberg’s suit came back exactly on schedule in 2018, and it has come back exactly on schedule again in 2025 and 2026, because the reverse halo effect was never a technique that could be learned. It was a rental agreement, and the landlord was always the establishment its wearer was supposedly too cool to dress for. Whether you can afford to skip the jacket, and have it cost you nothing, is a question your gender, your profession and your bank balance will answer for you long before you get dressed in the morning.
Avni Jain is an undergraduate student of Psychology with a minor in Human Resource
Management. She can usually be found dancing or making the case
for feminism.
