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As Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout and WeCrashed’s Adam Neumann show, you really are what you wear, especially if you’re Silicon Valley rich
- Elizabeth Holmes is only taken seriously when she adopts Steve Jobs’ ‘uniform’; the Neumanns of WeWork don’t need coats – they live in an air-conditioned world
- Shows The Dropout, WeCrashed and Super Pumped lean on style’s importance. ‘The wearer takes on the symbolic value of the clothes they wear,’ a psychologist says
Reading Time:3 minutes
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“Look, here’s the thing about being rich, it’s like being a superhero, only better. You get to do what you want. The authorities can’t really touch you. You get to wear a costume, but it’s designed by Armani and it doesn’t make you look like a prick.”
Could Tom Wambsgans (Matthew McFadyen’s obsequious, money-and-power-craving character in the hit show Succession) have summed up life for the 0.1 per cent any better?
The Roy family are media moguls trying to adapt to the new tech age, and television right now is particularly obsessed with Silicon Valley billionaires – all of whom have a uniform of sorts.
First, there is The Dropout, which follows Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes – a young woman who fooled half of America into thinking she had invented the future of medicine, despite the fact her much vaunted blood testing machine never actually worked.
The show illustrates how important her clothing was in presenting herself as a serious prospect, even though her product was anything but.
Melissa Twigg was born in South Africa, brought up in London and educated at the University of Bristol, where she read English, and the University of London Institute in Paris, where she studied French literature. She went on to work for Paris-based publishing house Éditions Gallimard before jumping ship to the world of journalism. Her writing career began at Condé Nast and it took her to Cape Town and then Hong Kong. She returned to London in 2016 where she has worked for a number of national newspapers, and as a freelance journalist. In 2017, she won a SOPA award for an investigation into rhino poaching and her writing today covers fashion, travel and lifestyle. She is – like everyone else in the industry – working on a novel.
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