According to Glover’s longtime stylist Ilaria Urbinati, this has been a conscious evolution. They started working together not long after Atlanta first premiered in 2016, segueing Glover’s blooming auteur persona into an accompanying red carpet wardrobe. When he was promoting his role as a young Lando Calrissian in the Star Wars spinoff movie Solo, they settled into a dapper, structured ’70s situation (to compliment the original Star Wars era) that lasted up until the pandemic—which, as we all are familiar with by now, is when everything shifted. They met back up in spring 2022 when it came time for Glover to promote the final season of his hit FX show Atlanta, and as Urbinati recalls it, “he just seemed much more like, zen Donald. He had gone through stuff in his own life.” From there, things got looser, silkier, more relaxed. Zen Donald emerged in 2022 with a shaved head and that cheery gray-ish beard, sporting a pair of luxuriously floppy pastel leisure suits: a marshmallow-pink Zegna look at the final Atlanta season premiere and a serene yellow set from the London-based brand King & Tuckfield to the 2022 Vanity Fair party. Off the carpet, he turned heads when he went for a jog in New York City sporting a bucket hat, tiny shorts—and little else. It was a look potent enough to land him on our end-of-year biggest fits list in December: “I just love that Donald Glover basically only wore 4 outfits this year (publicly) and a very solid short shorts / bucket hat combo, and still made it [to] GQ’s best dressed men of 2022 list,” Urbinati wrote on Instagram.
More recently, it’s still evolving: the vibe has been cozy (the fuzzy yellow Zegna) and weird (the cutout McQueen) and insouciant (the green Valentino). Funnily enough, Urbinati had actually wanted Glover to wear the yellow Zenga outfit to the Vanity Fair afterparty earlier this year, but realized she’d already dressed him in light yellow to the same event the year prior; “I was like, only Donald, would we have the issue of too many lemon-yellow outfits,” she joked. Luckily the swap also made sense thematically; for Swarm, Glover’s new Amazon Prime series about a Beyhive-esque fandom; the lemon-yellow look becomes a nod to the Lemonade of it all.
“I always jokingly refer to him as my muse,” says Urbinati, who’s dressed many of Hollywood’s most famous men including The Rock, Ryan Reynolds, and Rami Malek, plus recent standouts like Barry Keoghan and Diego Calva, for over a decade now. “I work differently with different clients. Sometimes it’s more like, ‘Oh, I’m really into this right now. I’m into that.’ With him, almost whatever else is happening in the world of fashion doesn’t really have a bearing on what I put on him, as much as what I’m reading off of his mood.”
“It’s an interesting thing because it is a time when everyone is wearing crazy shit,” she adds, “and you don’t want it to get into this weird peacocking of trying to wear crazy stuff for the sake of it.”
But Donald? “He’s down to play,” she says. And in this new era of formalwear, that’s always a great place to start.
