In a midseries episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David, the HBO present’s star and creator, greets his No. 1 frenemy, Susie, (Susie Essman), who has turned up at a elaborate gathering carrying a high hat and a morning coat.
He offers her a once-over, then publicizes, with all of the finesse of a carnival barker, “Girls and gents, the sixteenth president of america, Abraham Lincoln.”
Susie shoots him a stink eye. “Like you realize something about trend,” she sneers.
However Mr. David, 76, may beg to vary. On “Curb,” which ends its twelfth and last season on Sunday, he spews barbs like pepper spray, weighing in caustically on a welter of points: Who will get to devour the bigger share of a dessert, to chop in line, to take a seat on the cool youngsters’ desk?
However his most impassioned critiques have largely centered on trend and on tartly deconstructing what his buddies and different individuals are carrying.
All through his profession Mr. David, a Mr. Blackwell of tv comedy, has educated a gimlet eye on human foibles. As a creator, govt producer and head author for seven seasons of “Seinfeld,” he additionally lent that present his shrewd observational powers. Even those that haven’t watched (or rewatched) “Seinfeld” might have heard of the puffy shirt, the braless marvel or the fictionalized J. Peterman catalog firm, which was impressed by an actual enterprise of the identical title.
Then, as now, Mr. David operates on the premise that few issues are funnier or extra revealing than the coded messages we ship after we gown.
Trend is an instrument in his arsenal, not solely as a way of self expression however as a dependable measure of how we take into consideration ourselves, who we’re and who we wish to be.
Mr. David has, unsurprisingly, utilized his analytical prowess to his personal wardrobe. A perpetual outsider, the Jewish boy from Brooklyn, he’s no much less keen than the characters he targets to mediate the world round him by way of the nuances of gown.
His signature model — an obsessively thought of amalgam of long-sleeve polo shirts, tan trousers, nondescript hoodies, blazers and sneakers — appears meant to telegraph the standing and breezy self-assurance of a Hollywood bigwig. So do the baseball caps he usually wears onscreen and off, which have featured logos for the posh island resort Amanyara and for Air Mail, a digital publication catering to an prosperous crowd.
Mr. David makes no secret that his one-look-fits-all method is supposed partly to stick over his personal class anxieties and to concurrently prop up a shaky self-image. And he’s decided to slot in regardless of the circumstance: In an early episode of “Curb,” he asks Cheryl (Cheryl Hines), his onscreen spouse for a part of the sequence, what the typical gentile wears to a baptism.
Sartorially, he has adopted a particular credo: Put on one good merchandise at a time, “in any other case it’s an excessive amount of,” he as soon as advised GQ. “It’s important to be half-dressed. That’s my trend idea: Half is extra.” (A consultant for Mr. David didn’t reply to requests for remark for this text.)
Extra is repugnant to Mr. David, and calling it out has been a by way of line in his work. His proliferating listing of aversions in “Curb” embody floppy shorts and tucked-in shirts on males, extra-long shoelaces (he repeatedly journeys over his personal), bow ties, bedazzled sweatshirts and affectation in any type.
In a later “Curb” episode, he confronts his buddy Richard Lewis, the late comic, at Mr. Lewis’s artwork exhibition. Taking in his buddy’s silver-buttoned, mandarin collar tunic, Mr. David taunts, “Are you vying for the title of essentially the most pretentious man on this planet?”
Within the Season 10 finale, he eyes the pocket sq. worn by a tv correspondent who’s about to interview him. “It seems to be misplaced,” Mr. David chides. “That’s for some English dandy. It’s not for a journalist.”
Usually, he invokes trend throughout awkward or painful conditions. In an early episode, when a grieving window reveals him a treasured photograph of her husband, Mr. David zeros in on the lifeless man’s apparel. “I really like this shirt,” he tells the widow. “Do you will have any concept the place he received it?” he asks, a question that attests much less to his acquisitive nature than to his personal unease.
On “Curb,” Mr. David reserves a few of his sharpest zingers for people who find themselves making an attempt too arduous. In a midseries episode, his housemate Leon (J.B. Smoove), doing his greatest impersonation of an accountant, wears a go well with with a bow tie and spectacles. “What’s with this go well with?” Mr. David asks. “You appear like Farrakhan.”
He’s no much less affronted when folks’s garb appears inconsistent with their skilled standing. After seeing his psychiatrist prancing on a seaside in a skimpy Speedo in an early episode, he begins to query the physician’s bona fides. He equally bristles when his property lawyer turns up for a gathering in denims and tells Mr. David that it’s informal Friday. “I need you folks to be uncomfortable on a regular basis,” Mr. David responds.
And when an actual property agent who’s exhibiting a home insists to Mr. David and Mr. Lewis that his sweater is one hundred pc cashmere, Mr. David squinches up his options in disbelief.
“Perhaps 35 to 50 on the most,” he counters, earlier than saying to Mr. Lewis, “This man’s mendacity a couple of cashmere sweater. Do you’re feeling comfy with that?”
Once in a while, Mr. David’s critiques may be constructive — if flagrantly sexist.
In a midseason episode, he suggests to his workplace assistant, who’s carrying a skimpy T-shirt that exposes her midriff, that “if it’s not an excessive amount of bother,” she might begin carrying extra work-appropriate apparel. When she asks what exactly that may entail, he instructs her cheerily. “One thing between a this,” he says, gesturing at her shrunken high, “and a burqa.”
In one other episode, Mr. David casts a cool eye on Paula, an escort who’s turned out in the usual trappings of her commerce: a bustier, a tiny skirt and fishnet hose. “Why this outfit?” he asks benignly, happening to recommend that her enterprise may choose up if she wore one thing extra discreet.
She takes him up on his suggestion, buying and selling her spandex for cashmere, and, wouldn’t you realize, enterprise prospers. Mr. David, who is aware of completely effectively what his status-conscious friends would anticipate from a hooker, couldn’t be happier, asserting beatifically that he has carried out a mitzvah.
But once more, his critique proves spot on.