The Unofficial Guide to Dressing Like a Sun Valley Billionaire

Every July, a squadron of private jets drops into a small airport in central Idaho representing something approaching the entire net worth of the Nasdaq. The passengers shed their suits for vests and decamp to the Sun Valley Lodge, where for five days they cut the year’s biggest deals under the alibi of fly-fishing. This is the Allen & Company conference—billionaire summer camp, as the financial press has called it for more than four decades—and the most consequential week on the calendar that few present will discuss on the record.

Lately, the gathering turns on one subject. Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman all turned up in 2025; Elon Musk, mid-feud with the president, did not. The hallway talk wasn’t media or money but A.I.—one longtime regular called it the thousand-pound gorilla in every meeting. Altman arrived having just spent $6.5 billion on Jony Ive’s hardware startup, a deal that closed midweek. Expect a repeat in mid-July this year: a summit on the future of intelligence, dressed for a hike.

Now, what to wear to fit the part? Sun Valley is the native habitat of quiet luxury—the beige-on-greige uniform Succession turned into a dress code; all neutral shades and not a logo in sight. The look hasn’t budged in a decade: a polo, a vest, jeans broken in somewhere expensive. But the whisper is wearing thin, and the flex has crept to the margins of the outfit—the eyewear (Altman did the week in $410 Vuarnets cut like ski goggles), the cap, the technical gilet built for a mountain its owner will photograph and never climb. The 2026 kit, then: here are 15 pieces for the man who looks like he ambled down from a trailhead and might, between sessions, buy your company.