Unless you have a passionate opinion about your preferred artificial intelligence model, it’s likely the clothes that multi-billion dollar companies like OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic and Cohere are suddenly churning out aren’t meant for you. You likely aren’t going to be wearing Perplexity’s padded ecru jacket with a corduroy collar and a “Curious” fabric tag ($135) or Cohere’s “Stacking Stones” T-shirt ($41) with “The Material of Now” printed across the back. The same goes for OpenAI’s “Research” half-zip sweatshirt ($175), to say nothing of Palantir’s royal blue chore coat ($239). (Those are both sold out anyway.)
Tech industry types have gone all in. “Unfortunately cool as hell and I need it lol,” Rachel Tobac, CEO of the cybersecurity firm SocialProof Security, wrote on X after seeing OpenAI’s newest collection in July. “Good to see that tech merch isn’t boring anymore,” wrote Haimantika Mitra, a developer advocate at the cloud computing company Digital Ocean.
Ben King, a design director at OpenAI, said his team wanted to take cues from those boosters about exactly what they would be excited about in a piece of clothing. “We wanted to create cool, thoughtful items that reflect our product while also engaging with our own community and seeing what they’re wearing,” he said. Most of the clothing King saw on those people were the basic uniforms of the modern tech worker — T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats — so King, who has a background in designing streetwear, and his team set out to create the “best versions” possible. The merch was originally made for OpenAI employees to purchase on an internal site, but the team decided to make a small capsule collection available to the public. It sold out within days.
David-Alexandru Ilie, an intern at the tech company Vercel in London, bought two hats, a hoodie and a T-shirt for about $220 and, since he lives in the UK, paid more than $100 for shipping. He said the merch signals a certain level of affinity and expertise in the AI space. “When I’m wearing Codex-specific merch my goal is not to show that I’m a shill for OpenAI, but rather to show that I am a software engineer keeping up with current trends,” he said via email, referring to OpenAI’s code writing product. “Even though I’m not walking around Silicon Valley wearing this merch, I still like to feel like part of the software engineering community there.”
Community or cartel?
Rory Bernier, who runs a tech advisory firm in Connecticut, said wearing a hoodie he was sent from the Perplexity team as a gift gave him an air of “proximity” to a favorite company. “Wearing it is a low-key signal, both to myself and to other people in the space, that I’m not just watching the AI wave, I’m in it,” he said via email. In that way, it’s similar to wearing a your sport’s team jersey or a band T-shirt.
For those outside the echo chamber of tech, though, responses to the merch have been less charitable. “[M]y catholic school uniform had more aura,” the photographer and writer Gavin Moulton posted on X. “I think that tech needs to reckon with the fact that if you zoom outside of our little bubble, the idea of wearing clothes with software logos makes you a really big nerd,” posted the designer J.D. Reeves.
Critics have called the design references passé. OpenAI’s lookbook for their capsule collection is an apparent homage to tastemaking brands like Kith and Aimé Leon Dore, two labels that turned laidback knitwear and box cut T-shirts into trends that saturated menswear in the last few years. “The aimé leon dore lookbook from 2023 does it again,” posted the brand strategist Lorenzo Lasagna.
The debate may look like it’s about clothes, but is in fact part of a wider skirmish between people that stand to benefit from a world dominated by AI products and those threatened by it. Some of the loudest opposing voices are creatives, who see the products being created by AI companies as something threatening to their own practice and to the world at-large. “They’re wolves in sheep’s clothing attempting to create the feeling that a tech company with merch is harmless,” said the graphic designer David Rudnick. “It’s like wearing the colors of a cartel or a paramilitary organization.”
