Fashion Can’t Get Over Michael Jackson

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The Fashions

Fashion Can’t Get Over Michael Jackson

With a new biopic crushing at the box office, a reflection on the industry’s selective memory around MJ. Plus, cowboy Crocs.

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MJ in his black loafers and shiny socks in 1983.

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Paul Drinkwater/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images

By

Jacob Gallagher

April 28, 2026,

12:00 p.m. ET

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A line in Mark Binelli’s

fascinating piece

in The New York Times Magazine about Michael Jackson’s estate-led rehabilitation campaign really jumped out at me. Referring to the early ’90s, the period in which the biopic “Michael” ends, Binelli writes, “It was also among the last moments that Jackson looked cool: the white V-neck and the unbuttoned white dress shirt, black pants, hair pulled back.”

What an astute observation. By this point in Jackson’s life, he had already given us his most iconic looks: the Sky Masterson-esque ivory pinstriped suit and cobalt blue socks in the “Smooth Criminal” video; the leather jacket from “Thriller,” as red as pulled taffy; and the

black Florsheim loafers

worn with sparkly socks, which he pulled out for his inaugural moonwalk in 1983.

It’s this period of Jackson that fashion has long been fixated on it. In images of him from this time, he’s still

just

the musical magician who vanquished MTV. The allegations of child molestation that would dog him through his later life (and afterlife) haven’t yet appeared. It’s this period that fashion designers have long been selectively fixated on, with little room for his personal life.

In 2017, Supreme sold a series of hoodies and tees showing a bow-tied “Billie Jean”-era MJ. In January 2019, Louis Vuitton, then under the stewardship of Virgil Abloh, created an entire collection inspired by Jackson. Abloh, in an interview before the show, described Jackson as “the most important innovator in men’s wear history,” a plaudit that,

even then

, came off as too generous.

There were ensembles with characters from 1978’s “The Wiz” (including Jackson’s Scarecrow), a cherry zip jacket owing to “Thriller” and a T-shirt with an airbrushed rendition of some gleaming socks parked in black shoes.

Image

In 2019, Louis Vuitton created an entire collection inspired by Jackson. Virgil Abloh, then the designer, described Jackson as “the most important innovator in men’s wear history.”

Credit...

Photographs by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

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