Mark Zuckerberg partners with designer and creates his own t-shirts with classic quotes

Mark Zuckerberg would like us all to know that learning is best achieved through suffering. And how does he tell us this? Through a t-shirt, of course.

“I kind of started working on a series of t-shirts with some of my favorite classic sayings on them,” Zuckerberg said in mid-September during a recording of the Acquired podcast at San Francisco’s Chase Center.

He was wearing a black, boxy T-shirt with thick white letters with the Greek phrase “pathei mathos”. Free translation? “Learning through suffering.” It was, according to Zuckerberg, “a little family saying.”

Another historical gem was conveyed through the t-shirt he wore to a Meta keynote presentation weeks later. This time, Greek was exchanged for Latin — more or less. His T-shirt (again square, again black) said “aut Zuck, aut nihil,” an Anglicized contortion of the Latin “aut Caesar, aut nihil” or something like “either a Caesar or nothing.”

It took more than a Zuck to create these baggy tees. As he explained on the podcast, they were made in partnership with Mike Amiri, a fashion designer based in Los Angeles.

Yes, between running Meta, making AI-enhanced glasses, raising three kids, and all that MMA training, the 40-year-old Facebook founder found time to add one more title to his resume: clothing designer.

Before creating his own T-shirts with old slogans, Zuckerberg wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the Latin “Carthago delenda est (Carthage must be destroyed)” on his 40th birthday in May. Similar t-shirts can be purchased for US$20 (about R$110) on Amazon.

The fact that Zuckerberg cares enough to create his own deliberately oversized t-shirts shows that the CEO’s extreme Meta-edition fashion transformation isn’t likely to slow down anytime soon.

In recent months, Zuckerberg has swapped his wet-newspaper gray hoodies for $250 Bode shirts with embroidered flowers. He grew his hair, gained muscles and put on a gold chain. Now, like Virgil Abloh wannabes have done before, he’s making his own t-shirts.

But what is the reason for Greek and Latin? Through a representative, Zuckerberg declined an interview request for this text. But he seems to fit the profile of an ancient man who reads Ovid, watches “Gladiator” and is concerned about Roman power.

He has studied Latin since high school. He spent his honeymoon in Rome and named one of his daughters August (like Augustus, understand?). And he commissioned artist Daniel Arsham to create a towering statue of his wife, Priscilla Chan, proclaiming on Instagram that he was “bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife.”

“If you stop and look at the reasons why people — especially young people — seem to quote the classics, it’s a desire for power,” said Marcus Folch, associate professor of classics at Columbia University. “It articulates a desire for power.”

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how Zuckerberg, guiding a nation-state of millions of app users, could imagine himself as a tech-age Tiberius. After all, he’s not just quoting a Caesar on these t-shirts, he’s comparing himself to him.

Zuckerberg may have entered the imperialist phase of his transformation, but the meaning of the quotes may be getting lost between the text and the t-shirt. John Noël Dillon, senior reader in the classics department at Yale University, pointed out that “aut Caesar, aut nihil” is commonly attributed to the Italian cardinal Cesare Borgia, the inspiration for Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” In the end, lasting power eluded him, and he was stabbed to death at the age of 31.

According to scholars, “pathei mathos” is less directly egocentric. It’s a “very profound, kind of profound” quote originating from Aeschylus’ mythological play about Agamemnon, Folch said. This text isn’t exactly obscure — if you took a Greek literature course in college, you probably read it — but it displays a richer historical expertise than wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “veni vedi vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”). .

But what to think about the Amiri-Zuck t-shirts? Are these baggy t-shirts high-end design objects? Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster, said yes.

“Where it differs from your standard $10 tee is in the materiality, cut, construction and silhouette, all of which are much more thought out and deliberate,” he said, describing how its dropped shoulders, looser fit and Longer sleeves push custom tees into statement-piece territory.

For now, as an app in early development, the shirts are not available for public consumption, although Zuckerberg hinted in Instagram comments that a “limited release” may be on the way. No clues were shared about the price, but similar Amiri t-shirts sell for US$750 (up from R$4,116). A princely sum indeed.