Larry David’s Unsung Trend Criticism on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’

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 flowery gathering carrying a high hat and a morning coat.
He provides her a once-over, then pronounces, with all of the finesse of a carnival barker, “Women and gents, the sixteenth president of the USA, Abraham Lincoln.”
Susie shoots him a stink eye. “Like you realize something about vogue,” 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 eat the bigger share of a dessert, to chop in line, to take a seat on the cool children’ desk?
However his most impassioned critiques have largely centered on vogue 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 once we costume.
Trend is an instrument in his arsenal, not solely as a method of self expression however as a dependable measure of how we take into consideration ourselves, who we’re and who we need 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 means of the nuances of costume.
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 partially 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 informed GQ. “You must be half-dressed. That’s my vogue principle: 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 means of line in his work. His proliferating record 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 pal Richard Lewis, the late comic, at Mr. Lewis’s artwork exhibition. Taking in his pal’s silver-buttoned, mandarin collar tunic, Mr. David taunts, “Are you vying for the title of probably the most pretentious man on the planet?”
Within the Season 10 finale, he eyes the pocket sq. worn by a tv correspondent who’s about to interview him. “It seems misplaced,” Mr. David chides. “That’s for some English dandy. It’s not for a journalist.”
Typically, he invokes vogue throughout awkward or painful conditions. In an early episode, when a grieving window exhibits him a treasured picture of her husband, Mr. David zeros in on the useless man’s apparel. “I really like this shirt,” he tells the widow. “Do you will have any thought the place he obtained 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 attempting too arduous. In a midseries episode, his housemate Leon (J.B. Smoove), doing his greatest impersonation of an accountant, wears a swimsuit with a bow tie and spectacles. “What’s with this swimsuit?” Mr. David asks. “You appear like Farrakhan.”
He’s no much less affronted when individuals’s garb appears inconsistent with their skilled standing. After seeing his psychiatrist prancing on a seashore 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 individuals to be uncomfortable on a regular basis,” Mr. David responds.
And when an actual property agent who’s displaying 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 are feeling snug with that?”
Now and again, 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 hassle,” she might begin carrying extra work-appropriate apparel. When she asks what exactly that might 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 counsel that her enterprise might decide 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 properly what his status-conscious friends would count on from a hooker, couldn’t be happier, saying beatifically that he has carried out a mitzvah.
But once more, his critique proves spot on.