The Gods of Silicon Valley are in the dog house. That much is obvious. They’ve been reckless with your data, shown a flagrant disregard for electioneering ethics and helped facilitate a new era of cold war tension.

But beyond the Cambridge Analytica scandal, they're guilty of another, more pernicious crime - one less demanding of headlines, perhaps, but still ominous and far-reaching.

We're talking about men's style.

In well-air-conditioned offices in Northern California, thousands of grown men dress in tribute to their tech heroes, with disastrous consequences. It has spread to the meeting rooms of Shoreditch, Kyoto, Toulouse - anywhere that 'start up culture' has taken hold. And at the top, there’s an unholy trinity of men responsible.

What does it look like, exactly, this New Media style atrocity? Generally speaking: casual clothing that should normally be saved for the gym (or at least a Sunday when you wouldn’t anticipate human contact). Unflattering, unstylish, and without a semblance of tailoring. Unshapely hoodies, jeans and (shudder) flip-flops. Outfits that belong to awkward teenagers hobbled over a Playstation draped on the bodies of thirty-something professional men.

None are guiltier than Mark Zuckerberg. If the Washington rumour mill is correct and his recent hiring of a former Clinton pollster alludes to a presidential run, then his suit of choice at last week's US Senate hearing did not bode well: a jacket that didn't quite fit around the shoulders, a tie crying out to be tightened.

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Of course, Capitol Hill is no Milan Fashion Week. But nor is it an accountancy firm in Crewe. JFK once walked those halls, a vision in Ivy League tailoring. Joe Biden grabbed every suit by the peak lapel with a striped tie that'd bring a tear to Ralph Lauren's eye. Even Donald Trump - a man who has more style faux pas than he does presidential ones - makes more of an impact with the good old Republican red power tie. In all environments, there's room to make a statement with clothing - even somewhere as conservative as DC.

But it is Zuckerberg's standard off-duty look that has most to answer for. He’s openly disclosed that he’s 'found what he likes' - pallid grey T-shirt and forgettable denim - and sticks to it as a uniform, no doubt hoping to emulate Apple’s patron saint Steve Jobs. But Zuck's get-up lacks the mystique of Jobs' go-to black turtleneck. It is meant to say he doesn't care - that clothes are secondary to lifestyle - but any grown adult knows that dressing to say 'I don't care' really just means 'I don't know what I'm doing'.

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Then there is Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s 27-year-old founder and the world’s youngest billionaire. He's a proponent of the worst kind of ‘tech rockstar’ aesthetic, pairing longline deep V-necks with not-quite-slimline jeans. The end result - something worryingly close to a white adolescent Ludacris fanboy - is made all the worse by his tall build, which is elongated beyond all human proportion by such wardrobe choices. Though he has just married Miranda Kerr, so the last laugh probably belongs with him.



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Elon Musk, sadly, doesn't hold such a trump card. Worse, Silicon Valley’s rocket man has carefully curated his style transformation, going from anaemic coder to cool alpha male. Yet it’s not really a universal understanding of ‘cool’. This is a backwater teenage interpretation of it - the kind of 'cool' flexed by graduates from the Steven Seagal School of Style, or the equally reviled Simon Cowell Institute. It’s a particular type of uniform. A bootleg jean, dad's leather jacket and a porn star plumber's too-tight tee - extra points for a showboat watch, too.

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Every company models itself on the Silicon Valley behemoths now, and the consequence is that dress codes are becoming ever more relaxed. This could be a good thing: an opportunity to define a new era of stylish dressing that values comfort as well as aesthetics. Instead, men are making the easiest, worst choices and with them losing a sense of pride in the workplace.

So forget the data breach (for now, anyway). It’ll soon be stemmed by a shiny new system of user protection. If only the algorithm for sloppy dressing – and the real crime of Silicon Valley – was so easily quashed.

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