From Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, chapter 28, “CEO: Still Crazy After All These Years”, p. 361:
On a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, Jobs asked Sony’s chairman,
Akio Morita, why everyone in his company’s factories wore
uniforms. “He looked very ashamed and told me that after the war,
no one had any clothes, and companies like Sony had to give their
workers something to wear each day,” Jobs recalled. Over the years
the uniforms developed their own signature style, 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 one of its uniforms. It was a
jacket made of ripstop nylon with sleeves that could unzip to make
it a vest. “So I called Issey 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, because of both 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 gestured to them stacked
up in the closet. “That’s what I wear,” he said. “I have enough to
last for the rest of my life.”
As my review of the book noted, Isaacson’s biography is profoundly flawed, at times grossly factually wrong, when it comes to documenting Jobs’s work. But it’s still a valuable book overall, and a unique resource regarding the personal aspects of Jobs’s life. (Purchase links: Amazon (which somehow has the hardcover edition for just $12), Bookshop.org, and Apple Books.)
Bonus excerpt, from chapter 20, “A Regular Guy: Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word”, regarding Jobs’s biological sister, the novelist Mona Simpson:
One of the few things they would argue about was her clothes. She
dressed like a struggling novelist, and he would berate her for
not wearing clothes that were “fetching enough.” At one point his
comments so annoyed her that she wrote him a letter: “I am a young
writer, and this is my life, and I’m not trying to be a model
anyway.” He didn’t answer. But shortly after, a box arrived from
the store of Issey Miyake, the Japanese fashion designer whose
stark and technology-influenced style made him one of Jobs’s
favorites. “He’d gone shopping for me,” she later said, “and he’d
picked out great things, exactly my size, in flattering colors.”
There was one pantsuit that he had particularly liked, and the
shipment included three of them, all identical. “I still remember
those first suits I sent Mona,” he said. “They were linen pants
and tops in a pale grayish green that looked beautiful with her
reddish hair.”
Issey Miyake, the man, died in 2022 at 84.
