How to Foil the Paparazzi, According to Jeremy Allen White

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Jeremy Allen White’s easygoing uniform of khaki button-ups, white tanks, faded blue jeans, and beat-up sneakers have earned him plenty of coverage in men’s fashion publications such as this one. But there’s perhaps another reason why the actor can’t stop wearing sweater vests: He’s trying to thwart the paparazzi.

In a new cover story for British GQ’s 2023 Men of the Year issue, White tells GQ’s Cam Wolf about his intense rise to high-profile fame over the last two years. Though he’d been a steady working actor for over a decade, it wasn’t until he starred in FX’s knockout series The Bear that tabloid photographers began tracing his whereabouts, tracking him down on his jogs through residential Los Angeles neighborhoods or at his children’s soccer games. At some point, he thought that if he wore the same outfit to his kids’ games (“ratty black shirt, Adidas slides, my [Mets] cap I wear every day,” he explains), the paparazzi photos would be less enticing to media outlets, because he’d look the same in all of them.

For a time, the strategy worked, somewhat: “They did kind of stop,” White says. As Wolf points out, uniform-dresser-extraordinaire Leonardo DiCaprio also deflects paparazzi by frequently wearing the same nondescript, navy-toned outfits and covering his face with a ball cap (or, as the case may be, a Halloween mask). In a 2017 New York Times interview, Katy Perry admitted to wearing a black Adidas tracksuit whenever she left the house in an attempt to “to make the photographs less sellable.” And even Daniel Radcliffe has been known to deploy a similar strategy. Appearing on The Kelly Clarkson Show last year, Radcliffe fessed up to wearing variations on the same ensemble for “three or four months” while doing a play in London years back.

“Every night there was paparazzi outside, and I suddenly realized after like after I [had] just been lazy and not changed my clothes for a few days, that they were not there,” said Radcliffe, who’s been hounded by paps since his Harry Potter days. “I realized it’s probably because I’m wearing the same thing, so it all looks like photos from the same day. So I was like ‘I’ll just continue wearing this.’ And they never came back because it all looks like the same picture in front of the same door.”

Radcliffe added that a friend once gave him a jacket made from a reflective material that, when photographed, creates glare in the pictures. “It’s as cool as something like that can look,” he admitted. It’s true—sounds kind of swaggy.

Originally Appeared on GQ

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