In the past few years, Jeremy Strong has become an unlikely style icon. This is thanks largely in part to his role as billionaire scion Kendall Roy in Succession, where he exemplified the surging “quiet luxury” trend in his penchant for expensive but unflashy cashmere ball caps and overcoats. When he’s not in character, Strong, who says he has always loved clothes, is a deeply intuitive dresser. He is drawn to fashion that is made by small-batch artisans, in a narrow aesthetic band. Famously, much of his wardrobe is brown.
Of his tendency to dress entirely in rich shades of cocoa, as Strong told Gabriella Paiella in his GQ cover story: “It’s monastic. Monastic chic.”
On Saturday evening in Milan, Strong arrived at the Cloisters of San Simpliciano. He was the guest of honor at a dinner hosted by GQ and Loro Piana in the arcade of the 16th Century church, and he had picked up an outfit at the Italian ultra-luxury brand’s store earlier that day: a white shirt, brown trousers, a tan bucket hat plucked from the women’s section, and a blazer in a striking shade of green. Strong, clearly, was exploring slightly new sartorial territory.
Loro Piana sits at the center of the Venn diagram between Kendall Roy and Strong’s wardrobes. For Kendall, as Strong explained in the garden of the cloisters, the brand represented everything about the “stealth wealth” trend that emerged in tandem with the show’s cultural dominance. For Strong himself, the brand’s devotion to perfection serves as a metaphor for his own relentless quest. And it speaks to his broader fascinations in fashion, which focus on fellow obsessives dedicated to their craft.
As swallows performed their evening murmurations above us, Strong explained further.
Jeremy Strong: [Laughs.] I'm branching out, maybe. I'm very instinctive about everything, I guess. So I went in today and just picked out what I was drawn to. Obviously I have an awareness of the brand that pre-exists Succession, but that really deepened my understanding of, and my appreciation for it. And for me it really made a close-knit relationship to the brand. It was an important part of signalling something about the character, but in tandem with that, it's a house that has a multi-generational obsession with the quest for excellence and uncompromising quality. There's something about the story of their process, the alchemy of taking these raw fibres from the vicuña, and from merino sheep, and transforming them, transmuting them, into masterpieces that I'm really into.
Kendall is a separate thing. For Kendall, Loro Piana represented a supreme, rarefied level of luxury and comfort and the sort of if-you-know-you-know thing, and that's part of the story we were telling with the character. For me, I just love that quality of obsessiveness and relentlessness and the unending search for an elusive perfection. Which for me is elusive. But for them is actually quite achieved.
Paul Harnden, Geoffrey B. Small. Hans Nicholas Mott is a clothing maker that I really love and have gotten to know. I've always appreciated the scale of the individual dedicated to the thing that they're doing. When did it start? I've just always loved clothes. I've always felt in a very primal way that, probably all of us here, that it's such an immediate and palpable way of expressing something about ourselves. I care about aesthetic and I care about how something is expressed, and it's a pretty narrow aperture for me. As you said, it is usually a certain palette. It takes a certain form and character, and I guess I've just been drawn to clothing that has character. To me, Loro Piana is the pinnacle of clothing that has a certain definition and character. There’s something ineffable about it.
And it's not just clothing. Hans gave me a book that Peter Zumthor wrote about architecture, and we're coming from Copenhagen and I was just reading René Redzepi’s journal from year one of Noma — the story to me is the same across disciplines, whether it's in fashion or clothing or in architecture or gastronomy or film and acting. It's people who are working on the frontier of something, and trying to do something bold and innovative and who are committed to doing it well. But I also love being able to — you know, this was not on the menu [points at bucket hat]. I love being able to follow your intuition with clothing and sort of break rules.
Yeah, it awakened something in me. You know I think the truth is, when I first talked to [GQ editor] Will [Welch] about it, I felt disingenuous about doing a shoot in the boxing ring because I'm not a boxer, and I know people who are boxers, and it's something I really respect as a discipline and I take that really seriously. But I am a fighter, and our shoot was obviously a metaphor. So you try to channel things inside of you, or key into aspects of yourself that are inchoate. And so yeah, it awakened something in me. And I joined a local gym after that to get into it. But I don't want to lay some claim to that. That really was symbolic for me more than anything. But it did evoke my interest and it is something that I've gotten into since.
Yeah, Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People. Sam Gold, who's an amazing director, who's a really old friend of mine, sent me the play. I have never read it. I couldn't have been further in my mind from a desire or hunger to do a play, and I read it and I just immediately called him and said, let's do it. I can't explain it. It’s that thing. It’s just all the right reasons. Just that inner yes that rarely comes, but when it comes, you have to listen to it, otherwise you're lost. Despite the trepidation that I feel about doing it, which is immense, and returning to the theatre — I haven't done a play in over 10 years. But it is such a heavyweight play, but it's a play that speaks to our moment in many ways. It’s about someone who is made into a pariah for speaking the truth or speaking his truth, and it’s sort of a play about the court of public opinion.
It's an amazing play. It speaks to cancel culture, it speaks to climate change. It speaks to so many afflictions of right now, and it does so in such a powerful and simple way. We’re going to do it at the Circle in the Square Theatre where I saw the great Philip Seymour Hoffman do True West when I was in college, and I remember sitting in the back of that theatre in the last row. The lights were going down before the play started, and I remember sort of saying a prayer. Like, I hope one day I get to do this. So it is an answer to that prayer for me.
Well, it's interesting. I mean, haven't followed it much, because I'm not really online. The thing that interests me is when you make these things, it is all very intuitive and in a sense, accidental and contingent. I just walked into a store and picked out a hat, just on an impulse, because it felt necessary in life. So then it has this ripple effect and it gets amplified and a narrative gets told, but really these were just choices that had a veracity in terms of that particular character and that work. But I was never trying to start a thing.
I guess what's interesting about it is we live in an increasingly binary world, where there's sort of mass-produced, popular, mechanised, routinised production, and then there's what we're talking about, and I think I see people being drawn more and more to anything that is representative of a kind of authenticity as opposed to the other thing, as opposed to mass branding. So what do I make of the conversation? I don't know. I feel outside the conversation, I feel sort of like a weather vane of it all. A rooster on a weather vane. Wearing a bucket hat.
