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Mark Zuckerberg wore a tie to work every single day for one year back in 2009. At the end of the year, he wrote this on this personal Facebook page: “After the start of the recession in 2008, I wanted to signal to everyone at Facebook that this was a serious year for us. Great companies thrive by investing more heavily while everyone else is cutting back during a recession. But great companies also make sure they’re financially strong and sustainable. My tie was the symbol of how serious and important a year this was, and I wore it every day to show this.”
Testifying in front of Congress for two days to address your company’s alleged involvement in the improper sharing of tens of millions of users’ personal information is also serious and important. This morning, Zuckerberg was seen wearing a tie again and also a shiny new suit, which, by the way, didn’t do much to mask the spooked look on his face. The next 48 hours will indeed be taxing for the 33-year-old hoodie-and-flip-flop–wearing whiz kid who started Facebook from his Harvard dorm room with a chip on his shoulder. Zuckerberg has certainly come a long way since then, as has Facebook, but even so his quick crisis change from T-shirt and jeans to suit and tie seems to represent more than a professional protocol—it symbolizes a cosmic and necessary shift from confident boy wonder to accountable grown-up.
The term suit is often used to describe a rather uptight but formidable businessman or politician. A suit is everything that Zuckerberg and his tech-giant buddies have resisted as they’ve come up. You would never see a suit wearing a zip-up sweatshirt and holding meetings on a circle of bean-bag chairs, for example. Suits, and the suits who wear them, represent the stuffy old guard, not the free-flowing Silicon Valley first made famous by Steve Jobs and his black mock turtleneck.
This isn’t to say that Zuckerberg has never worn a suit and tie before, because he has, whether it was to meet the president of China, to discuss fake news with Barack Obama, or to get married. But those instances were mostly orchestrated on his own terms and they were, by and large, markers of his position of power and his stronghold on the Internet itself. He and his signature laid-back look are the totems of social media. Today his sharp suit acts as a sort of visual death knell to that control. Zuckerberg and his business have gotten way too global and impactful for the hoodies, T-shirts, and flip-flops. Whether he likes it or not, he is a suit now, one who will face the ultimate test of corporate responsibility. In the end, Zuckerberg is probably going to need more than a starched lapel to save Facebook.
