Look of the Week: Nvidia’s CEO appeared in a very stylish archival leather jacket. If only it were real

When an image allegedly showing Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in his first public appearance since reports of an extramarital affair with an alleged Chinese spy punctured his public image and sent his company’s shares tumbling, it quickly went viral. Huang was sporting a different look than usual. Instead of his signature smooth motorcycle-style leather jacket, he wore a much more ostentatious, studded version that online commentators quickly identified as Hedi Slimane-era Saint Laurent, an-eye catching archival grail for a man under siege. There’s only one problem. “Those images are fake,” a spokesperson for Nvidia said in an email. The image’s proliferation speaks to the growing impossibility of distinguishing real from fake as AI tools — like the ones Nvidia’s chips power — further permeate our personal algorithms. In theory, it would have been a great (and distracting) look: a very flashy stepping out for a very difficult moment in the AI mogul’s career. “First person in history to have negative aura wearing archive Hedi,” read one comment with over a thousand likes on a post featuring the images, referring to Slimane, the French designer who served as Saint Laurent’s’s creative director from 2012 to 2016 before taking the reins at Celine until 2024. The images appear to be altered from a real image of Huang arriving at Seoul’s Gimpo International Airport in June. They were seemingly plausible in part because the jacket was a variation on Huang’s uniform. The AI leader is almost always seen in a slim-cut leather jacket. He has, he told CBS, close to 30 or 40 leather jackets. Like other tech leaders who have opted for uniforms in the mold of Steve Jobs’ Issey Miyake black turtlenecks, he cited the fact that wearing the same outfit makes it easier for him to focus his attention on bigger things (like building a technology quickly taking over huge swaths of the global economy). “Black is the absence of choice,” he told CBS. “That’s one decision made, one less thing to deal with. For everybody else, they probably have to make 3 or 4 decisions. I took that off my plate. It’s fantastic.” Huang’s classic leather jacket is an edgier, more striking look than the slouchy t-shirts favored by Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman. It’s the favored garment of bikers everywhere, James Dean wannabes, and anyone trying to embody an ideal of timeless cool. He occasionally wears variations, like a reptile-skin version he sported for a keynote speech at the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show. One of his pieces, a Tom Ford jacket touted as the “CEO’s Uniform” and the “Jensen Jacket,” was auctioned by Sotheby’s earlier this year, which described it as “a symbol of his leadership style embodying authenticity, ingenuity, persistence, courage and joy.” It sold for close to $1 million, roughly double the presale estimates. Huang, who has been married to his college sweetheart since 1985, has admitted to having an affair, saying he “hurt his wife and children,” but hasn’t named the other person involved. US intelligence have concluded in a classified memo issued in May that a close associate of Huang’s Alice Huang (no relation) was a Chinese intelligence asset. In interviews, he’s attributed his signature look to his wife Lori, who he told CBS buys his jackets for him. “I’m happy that my wife and daughter dress me,” he said in an interview for HP’s tech podcast “The Moment” in 2023.