How Donald Glover Mastered Creative Black Tie

“I was told it was ‘black tie,’ so I wore a black tie,” Donald Glover said on the red carpet at the first-annual Global Creativity Awards last week. “I was like, ‘What else can I not do?’ That was the only rule.”

The GQ cover star—and 2023 GCA honoree—was wearing a full Valentino look: a black silk tie and a classic white shirt underneath a glossy, Hulk-green leather shell jacket, with black trousers and boots. The top half of the look was plucked right from the label’s fall 2023 runway, which creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli quite literally called his “Black Tie” collection. He said was inspired by his 15-year-old daughter’s free-wheeling notion of formalwear. On the carpet, Glover leaned his back against the blood-red step-and-repeat, knee bent with one foot pressed up against the banner, green popping against the crimson.

The evening’s dress code of “creative black tie” seems like a pretty good catch-all term for Glover’s easygoing approach to dressing for events these last couple years—which also seems to coincide with the actor-auteur’s unflappable lease on life these days. Glover’s been famous for over a decade, and during the latter half of that time he’s become one of our foremost interpreters of funky style. Coming off the cult success of the NBC sitcom Community, he spent his early Childish Gambino days like many of his contemporaries: inhaling the last gasp of indie sleaze, clad in the plaid shirts, zip-up hoodies, and indie-nerd black-rimmed glasses. But by the time Glover sported a Saint Laurent pajama suit at the 2023 Golden Globes earlier this year, it looked like he’d stepped onto the red carpet just as he would a hotel patio for an evening cigarette. The next month, he wore a sexy quagmire of an Alexander McQueen jumpsuit to the Vanity Fair Oscars afterparty, and then a nubby-soft, butter-yellow Zegna set to the premiere of his latest TV series Swarm. There’s a comfortable swagger there, and surely the “seriously grown and sexy situation” that is Glover’s salt-and-pepper beard doesn’t hurt, either.

But his green Valentino jacket felt like a similar gesture as the laidback black nylon Prada anorak Frank Ocean wore to the 2019 Met Gala, albeit in a more hallucinatory color scheme: what exactly can one do to break the rules just enough? 

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.