The Man Who’s Helped Elon Musk, Tom Brady, And Ari Emanuel Get Dressed
Four weeks before the Emmy Awards, Barry Jossen, the executive vice-president of A&E Studios, stood on a wooden platform at a Beverly Hills tailor shop, wearing a two-year-old Armani tuxedo that he thought fit just fine. Andrew Weitz, an intense, wiry man whom Jossen had hired to update his look, squinted at Jossen’s trousers. He turned to Mario Gonzales, the tailor. “Do the pant,” Weitz ordered. “See that?” He pulled the material tighter against Jossen’s shin. “If you keep it this way—” He let go of the fabric. “Eh, you’re older. This”—Weitz pinched the fabric again—“hooks you up.” “Taper the pant,” Gonzales said, and bent down to ease a line of pins through the back of Jossen’s right trouser leg. Weitz wore a teal Isaia blazer with a pocket square in a lavender bandanna print (pocket squares are one of his signatures), a Gucci shirt, and white Canali chinos. Jossen had arrived in a gray polo shirt and baggy jeans. Ten minutes and dozens of pins later, Weitz stood back. “See the difference?” he crowed. “We went a little shorter, and slimmed out your sleeve! You’re probably, like, ‘I can’t tell the difference.’ ” They turned to office clothes. Weitz and his associate, a thirty-three-year-old woman named Neda Rouhani, had amassed a pile of Brunello Cucinelli dress shirts, on consignment from Neiman Marcus. They had to figure out whether Jossen, who is fifty-nine, and has a headful of tight salt-and-pepper curls and a soul patch, was a medium or a large. Ignoring a modesty screen, Jossen stood in the middle of the room and shrugged on a lavender striped shirt. Tugging at the buttonholes, he lamented a recent weight gain. “You could be retaining water,” Weitz said, coaxing him into an aubergine cardigan and buttoning the front. Jossen looked like a schoolboy primed for an Easter-egg roll. Read more at The New Yorker.
