You saw Steve Jobs at the Apple conferences, you saw him when he met with other leaders of the US technology industry and every time he was dressed in the same model of black blouse and the same blue jeans plus the same model of "adidas ". Steve Jobs' clothing has generated many controversies over the years, some even calling him a "fashion icon", but everything started from the tragedy produced by the second world war. During a visit to one of Sony's factories in Japan, Steve Jobs asked its president why all employees wear the same clothes. The answer was simple: the Japanese were still suffering from the Second World War, they were so poor that they had no money for clothes, so Sony had given them all a uniform that they wore all the time.
Seeing what Sony achieved for its workers, Jobs wanted to bring the idea to the US and implement it for his own company, but when he presented everything on stage in front of the employees, he was booed until he got off the stage. However, this did not prevent him from contacting a famous Japanese designer who helped him make his own "uniform" through the clothes you see above. Jobs had several hundred black blouses, blue jeans and "adidas", and the above combination represented the "uniform" that ended up making him famous all over the world. And now you know why Steve Jobs dresses like that.
The story above represents an excerpt from the authorized biography by Walter Isaacson.
On a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, Jobs asked Sony's chairman Akio Morita why everyone in the company's factories wore uniforms. He told Jobs that after the war, no one had any clothes, and companies like Sony had to give their workers something to wear each day. Over the years, the uniforms developed their own signature styles, especially at companies such as Sony, and it became a way of bonding workers to the company. "I decided that I wanted that type of bonding for Apple," Jobs recalled.
Sony, with its appreciation for style, had gotten the famous designer Issey Miyake to create its uniform. It was a jacket made of rip-stop nylon with sleeves that could unzip to make it a vest. So Jobs called Issey Miyake and asked him to design a vest for Apple, Jobs recalled, "I came back with some samples and told everyone it would be great if we would all wear these vests. Oh man, did I get booed off the stage. Everybody hated the idea."
In the process, however, he became friends with Miyake and would visit him regularly. He also came to like the idea of having a uniform for himself, both because of its daily convenience (the rationale he claimed) and its ability to convey a signature style. "So I asked Issey to make me some of his black turtlenecks that I liked, and he made me like a hundred of them." Jobs noticed my surprise when he told this story, so he showed them stacked up in the closet. "That's what I wear," he said. "I have enough to last for the rest of my life."
