Jensen Huang's Black Leather Jacket Becomes a Meme After His Fall

A signed Tom Ford leather jacket worn by Jensen Huang sold for $960,000 at a Sotheby's charity auction in July — more than ten times its original price. Three months later, the same garment has become an internet punchline.

Huang resigned this week as founder and chief executive of Nvidia, after reports of multiple affairs. Within days, the black leather jacket he has worn for nearly two decades — always black, always with a black T-shirt and black jeans — was being mocked across social media. The Cut ran a story drawing a line between his taste for luxury outerwear and his infidelity, under the headline: "Jensen Huang's leather jackets confessed before he did." In the New York Times, the author Anand Giridharadas asked whether "an expensive leather jacket on a middle-aged man" had become "the new symbol of a honeypot victim."

What happened online?

The memes came fast. One widely shared AI-generated image showed a leather jacket flying at half-mast outside SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket company. Another fake image, depicting Huang in a studded leather jacket, fooled many viewers into believing it was real. Divorced-dad jokes circulated too. "Jensen leather jacket discourse reminds me of the time two years ago when I wore my beloved moto jacket to a party and my good friend said 'great jacket, sorry you got divorced'," one user wrote on X.

A wardrobe of 30 to 40 jackets

The mockery lands on a look Huang built deliberately. Like Steve Jobs's black rollneck and jeans, or Mark Zuckerberg's Latin-sloganed T-shirts, the black leather jacket became his visual trademark — worn at trade shows, parties and keynote speeches at developer conferences. He appeared on the cover of Time in 2021 in a black Tom Ford jacket.

In a September interview with CBS, Huang revealed he owns between 30 and 40 leather jackets. He credited his wife, Lori Huang, with choosing them. The collection ranges from motorcycle-inspired jackets with tighter fits and zips to collarless croc-embossed versions and clean-cut tailored cuts.

Why the jacket worked — until now

"The leather jacket is Huang's way of borrowing some cool," says Peter Bevan, a writer and stylist, pointing to the garment's "rebel history." That history runs deep: Marlon Brando led his biker gang in an asymmetric zip jacket in 1953's The Wild One; James Dean wore a similar style off-screen; David Bowie appeared in a black leather jacket on the cover of his 1977 album Heroes. Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, John Travolta in Grease and Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones cemented the jacket as a symbol of Hollywood style.

By choosing leather over a corporate suit, Huang signalled that he was unconventional — a leader, not a conformist. "It's basically Huang saying: 'I'm not a regular billionaire boss, I'm a cool billionaire boss'," Bevan says.

Huang himself offered a practical defence. Asked by CBS in October why he wore the same thing daily, he cited decision fatigue. "Black is the absence of choice," he said. "It's nice to wear the same thing every day because no surprises. For everybody else, they probably have to make three or four decisions. I took that off my plate. The moment I wake up, I could be thinking about important things."

His fellow tech billionaires played along. In 2024, Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo of the two swapping jackets, and later at the Siggraph conference in Colorado presented Huang with another: "It's black and leather and shearling," Zuckerberg said. "It's a vibe. I mean, get this guy a chain." Huang handed over the jacket he was wearing, explaining Lori had bought it to commemorate the conference. "This is worth more because it's used," Zuckerberg said as he put it on.

Who wears it well?

Bevan rates Huang's designer jackets as "the kind that most fashion insiders would rate," but warns that a box-fresh jacket "feels try hard" and "tips into midlife crisis territory fast." The biggest mistake, he says, is a jacket that is "too shiny, too new and too tight" — a charge often levelled at Jeremy Clarkson, who pairs his with bootcut jeans. The men who succeed, Bevan argues, are those who "look like they've owned it for ever": Lenny Kravitz, in his sixties like Huang, prefers a battered version; John Malkovich, a decade older, favours an oversized brown one; A$AP Rocky, in his thirties, has made the leather bomber his staple.

For those without youth or "rock-star DNA," Bevan suggests a cotton Harrington — "the same cool but none of the leather-clad midlife baggage."

Huang, meanwhile, may need a new default wardrobe. The leather jacket carried him through developer conferences and magazine covers. It will be harder to pull off at a congressional testimony.