Last week, Bill Maher said this about Steve Jobs:

“I know that he’s one of the few people who liberals and conservatives both like, you know, in the partisan country that we live in. And I just know that the right-wingers are going to try to claim him because he was a giant success. Please don’t do it, right-wingers. He was not one of you. He was not a corporate type. He was an Obama voting, pot-smoking Buddhist. He wasn’t one of you. So don’t try to claim Steve Jobs.”

That’s right: Steve Jobs was a billionaire industrialist who exemplified the entrepreneurial spirit and showed the power of free markets, but it didn’t count because he smoked weed. Why, he was so laid back and anti-corporate, he always were jeans and black turtlenecks. Take that, teabaggers!

Hey, Bill? About those turtlenecks? There’s an interesting story behind those, courtesy of Water Isaacson, author of Jobs’ upcoming official biography. Here’s an excerpt Isaacson just provided to Gawker:

On a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, Jobs asked Sony’s chairman Akio Morita why everyone in the company’s factories wore uniforms. He told Jobs that after the war, no one had any clothes, and companies like Sony had to give their workers something to wear each day. Over the years, the uniforms developed their own signatures styles, especially at companies such as Sony, and it became a way of bonding workers to the company. “I decided that I wanted that type of bonding for Apple,” Jobs recalled.

Sony, with its appreciation for style, had gotten the famous designer Issey Miyake to create its uniform. It was a jacket made of rip-stop nylon with sleeves that could unzip to make it a vest. So Jobs called Issey Miyake and asked him to design a vest for Apple, Jobs recalled, “I came back with some samples and told everyone it would great if we would all wear these vests. Oh man, did I get booed off the stage. Everybody hated the idea.”

In the process, however, he became friends with Miyake and would visit him regularly. He also came to like the idea of having a uniform for himself, both because of its daily convenience (the rationale he claimed) and its ability to convey a signature style. “So I asked Issey to make me some of his black turtlenecks that I liked, and he made me like a hundred of them.”

Yeah, Bill Maher, what could be less corporate and right-wing than… mandatory uniforms for all employees?